ABSTRACT
At a time of raised terrorist threat, research that assists the security and police services to protect people and infrastructure is timely. One of the DScent project's research challenges was to determine whether scent trails could be analysed to reveal anomalous behaviours that differentiate between innocent activities unrelated to serious crime and deceptive activities with terrorist intent. Scent trails also provide an evolving set of data that can be used as evidence. This evolving disclosure of evidence is an important aspect of a criminal investigation in terms of ecological validity: rarely does an investigation team receive all the evidence for a case at once. The most widely used research paradigm in the field of deception detection research is a mock-crime scenario. The use of game environments is increasing as a psychological research tool, providing for complex interactions between individuals and their environments to be simulated in ways that are safe and controllable.
