Breakthrough percepts of online identity: Detecting recognition of email addresses on the fringe of awareness

Abstract

A key issue facing cybercrime investigations is connecting online identities to real‐world identities. This paper shows that by combining the Fringe‐P3 method with a concealed information test, we can detect a participant's familiarity with their own email address, thus connecting their real‐world identity to their online one. Participants were shown Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) streams of email addresses, some including their own email address (probe) or a target email address. Familiarity with the probe was accurately detected with significant results at the group level and for 7 of 11 participants at the individual level. These promising results demonstrate that the method can be successfully used to detect online identities. Factors that may affect how well an email address probe stands out in the RSVP streams are also discussed.

Breakthrough percepts of famous names

“…When placed within the context of Bowman et al (2013Bowman et al ( , 2014, Alsufyani et al (2019), andHarris et al (2021), the results here further demonstrate the potential of the Fringe-P3 method in forensic applications that require the use of different types of stimuli beyond own first name stimuli, including multi-item stimuli, such as full names, dates, and street addresses. Within forensic settings, the findings in this paper are particularly relevant to a set of identity related applications.…”

“…All stimuli were presented in RSVP using the Fringe-P3 method (Alsufyani et al, 2019;Bowman et al, 2013Bowman et al, , 2014Harris et al, 2021). RSVP streams were presented on a 20-inch LCD screen with a refresh rate of 60 Hz and a resolution of 1600x1200.…”

“…In contrast, the Fringe-P3 method for detecting concealed knowledge (Alsufyani et al, 2019;Bowman et al, 2013Bowman et al, , 2014Harris et al, 2021) relies upon the stimuli (the concealed BREAKTHROUGH PERCEPTS OF FAMOUS NAMES 5 knowledge, e.g. the participant's own-name) being intrinsically salient, causing it to be selected by the brain and consciously perceived.…”

“…Meanwhile, if the suspected own-name was truly not familiar to the participant, it would not breakthrough into awareness and would be no different to the other names in the stream. The method has also been shown to be successful in detecting when participants perceived familiar (famous) faces among unfamiliar faces (Alsufyani et al, 2019) and the participant's own email address among unfamiliar email addresses (Harris et al, 2021) in RSVP streams. A related method to the Fringe-P3 has also been used to detect concealed information of face, name, and word stimuli on the fringe of awareness based on involuntary eye movements (Rosenzweig and Bonneh, 2020).…”