No evidence for the utility of negative cues in a visual search-based concealed information test.

Kawashima T; Kabata T · 2026 · PubMed Central

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-04594-3

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Summary

This study investigates whether inefficient visual search behaviors, specifically slowing when participants are cued to ignore distractor features, can serve as a behavioral marker for concealed information. The Concealed Information Test (CIT) traditionally relies on physiological indicators to detect hidden knowledge, but reaction time (RT)-based methods are gaining interest due to practical advantages. The authors hypothesized that crime-relevant items, even when designated as distractors to be ignored, would interfere with search performance because they are motivationally salient and resistant to suppression. This approach was motivated by the “search while destroying” phenomenon, where attempting to ignore a salient item paradoxically draws attention to it, impairing task performance. The research comprised three experiments. Experiment 1 replicated the basic negative cueing paradigm using object-based visual stimuli to confirm that negative cues impair search efficiency compared to positive cues. Thirty participants performed a visual search task where they identified a target letter while ignoring or attending to cued objects. Experiments 2 and 3 adapted this paradigm into a CIT scenario. Participants were assigned a “stolen” item to conceal and performed visual searches where the concealed item sometimes appeared as a negative cue (to be ignored). Experiment 2 focused exclusively on negative cues, comparing search performance when the cue was the relevant concealed item versus an irrelevant distractor. Experiment 3 included trials where the relevant item did not appear, to control for general slowing caused by maintaining the secret in mind. Reaction times were the primary dependent measure. Experiment 1 confirmed that negative cueing resulted in longer search times and steeper search slopes than positive cueing, validating the inefficiency of ignoring distractors. However, Experiments 2 and 3 yielded null results. There were no significant differences in search performance between trials involving concealed cues and those involving irrelevant cues. Bayesian analyses strongly supported the null hypothesis, indicating that the presence of concealed information did not produce the expected attentional capture or search cost. The authors suggest that participants may have strategically suppressed attention to the concealed items or that the effect is too subtle to be detected via reaction times in this specific task design. The findings challenge the utility of negative cueing in visual search-based CITs, demonstrating that while attentional capture by salient items is a real phenomenon, it does not reliably translate into detectable reaction time deficits when the item is concealed information. The study concludes that the attentional “stickiness” of concealed stimuli may be overridden by task strategies or suppression efforts. Consequently, the authors emphasize the need to incorporate alternative markers, such as eye movements or physiological signals, to enhance the sensitivity of CITs in future research, as reaction time alone may be insufficient for detecting concealed knowledge in this paradigm.

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• visual search