The police conducted a lie-detection procedure, known as voice stress analysis, on Mr. Zimmerman that he passed, and they had him re-enact the encounter with Mr. Martin back at the Retreat the day after the shooting.
I went to the Center of Technology Transfer and asked them, 'Do you like this?' They said, 'Yeah, we like that.' " Steven Laken is the C.E.O. of Cephos, a Boston-based company that is developing a lie-detection product based on Kozel's watch-and-ring study.
It was a modified lie detection device that did not detect lies at all.
"Brain fingerprinting" records the brain's electrical activity to decide whether a person has "terrorist thoughts" or has visited "a terrorist training camp"; NolieMRI offers a sophisticated lie detection system.
A nurse (Ben Stiller) has an unnerving visit with his fiancée's father (Robert De Niro), a former C.I.A. man and an expert on lie detection.
At a recent meeting of a National Academy of Sciences committee on lie detection, in Washington, D.C., Hank Greely, a Stanford law professor, said, "When we make speculative leaps like these... it increases, sometimes in detrimental ways, the belief that the technology works".
That hasn't stopped fMRI from being marketed as a tool for lie detection – two companies called Cephos and No Lie MRI currently offer such services, the latter under a tagline of "New truth verification technology".
Taylor, E. "Hypnosis as a Countermeasure in Lie Detection".
Andrew Kozel and Mark George, then at the Medical University of South Carolina, were doing similar work at the time; in 2005, they published a study of fMRI lie detection in which thirty people were instructed to enter a room and take either a watch or a ring that had been placed there.
In theory, an improved method of lie detection could have as profound an impact as DNA evidence, which has freed more than a hundred wrongly accused people since its introduction, in the late eighties.
