Interfaculty PhD Scholarship, Graduate School of Philosophy (1.0 FTE)

Research project: Cognitive building blocks of lie detection

Lying is very common in social interactions among people. Being able to detect lies is therefore important for social functioning. Despite this, adults are generally not very good at detecting lies. In children, an understanding of truth and lies gradually develops during the school-age years and seems to require an understanding of other people’s beliefs and intentions. Children’s lie detection abilities thus seem to develop in tandem with their theory of mind abilities, but how these two abilities exactly interact in the course of children’s development, and what other factors are important, is still an open question. Furthermore, it is still unknown whether the ability to detect lies can be enhanced, which could help children and adults to maneuver in a world in which the truth of utterances is not always evident.

This interdisciplinary project studies how children develop the ability to detect other people’s lies. This ability not only requires adequate verbal skills and second-order theory of mind reasoning skills, but also the skills to construct and actively maintain a representation of one’s own knowledge, the knowledge of the speaker, and reality. As a starting point, existing computational cognitive models of sentence interpretation and theory of mind reasoning will be used, which will be integrated and expanded with representations of the knowledge involved. By running computational simulations of the resulting cognitive model, predictions will be generated about the timing of the components involved in sentence interpretation, theory of mind reasoning, and lie detection. These predictions will be empirically tested in psycholinguistic experiments with children and adults.

The project will be supervised by Prof. Petra Hendriks (Faculty of Arts), Prof. Barteld Kooi (Faculty of Philosophy), and Prof. Rineke Verbrugge (Faculty of Science and Engineering & Faculty of Philosophy).

Description of the PhD trajectory:

The successful applicant is committed to conducting independent and original scientific research, to report on this research in international publications and presentations, and to present the final results of the research in a PhD dissertation. The PhD student participates in local, national and international training activities, including summer schools and conferences, to maximally develop their potential.

As a member of the Graduate School of Philosophy, the PhD candidate may participate in courses, seminars and summer schools organized by the Dutch graduate school Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap (LOT), The Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS), or the Groningen Research School of Behavioural and Cognitive Neurosciences (BCN).