A short summary of the project’s aims:

Children begin telling lies as early as two and a half years old. As they grow older, they become capable of telling various types of lies. Although young children have limited ability to control semantic leakage, detecting their deceptive behavior remains challenging. Detecting children’s deception is crucial for both moral education and legal contexts. This project aims to develop advanced statistical learning techniques, such as social network analysis and high-dimensional statistical analysis, to detect children’s deception through their verbal and non-verbal cues. Theoretically, the project seeks to enhance our understanding of cognitive load theory of deception and contribute to statistical approaches for analyzing complex behavioral data from multiple sources. Practically, it will offer valuable insights into best practices for statistical analyses in child development research and interviewing techniques for educational and legal professionals working with children.