Describe the Concealed Information Test (CIT),including Its Purpose and General

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The Answer is The CIT does not assess deception but instead seeks to determine whether the suspect knows details about a crime that only the person who committed the crime would know.The general form of the CIT is a series of questions in multiple-choice format.Each question has one correct option (often called the critical option)and four options that are foils-alternatives that could fit the crime but that are incorrect.A CIT question in the context of a homicide might take the following form: "Did you kill the person with (a)a knife, (b)an axe, (c)a handgun, (d)a crowbar,or (e)a rifle?" The guilty suspect is assumed to display a larger physiological response to the correct option than to the incorrect options.An innocent person,conversely,who does not know the details of the crime,will show the same physiological response to all options.Underlying the CIT is the principle that people will react more strongly to information they recognize as distinctive or important than to unimportant information.Suspects who consistently respond to critical items are assumed to have knowledge of the crime.
Critics of the CIT have warned that this test will work only if the suspect remembers the details of the crime ( Honts & Schweinle,2009 ).Criminals may not remember specific details from their crimes or may have memory interference from past crimes.Iacono and Patrick (1999 )suggested two reasons for the lack of widespread acceptance of the CIT.First,since polygraph examiners believe in the accuracy of the CQT,they are not motivated to use the more difficult-to-construct CIT.Second,for law enforcement to use the CIT,salient features of the crime must be known only to the perpetrator.If details of a crime appear in the media,the crime-related details given cannot be used to construct a CIT.

Describe the Concealed Information Test (CIT),including Its Purpose and General

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