Hans-Georg Rill

Hans-Georg Rill was a researcher affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Research Group Forensic Psychophysiology at Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany. He worked closely with a collaborative research team that included Matthias Gamer, Gerhard Vossel, and Heinz Werner Gödert, focusing on the psychophysiological detection of deception and concealed information. His work was primarily conducted in laboratory settings examining the fundamental mechanisms underlying deception detection.

Rill's primary research contribution to polygraph science centered on the Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT) and its variant, the Guilty Actions Test (GAT). His 2006 study published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology examined the validity of various physiological and vocal measures for the identification of guilty and innocent participants in a mock crime paradigm, finding that electrodermal, respiratory, and cardiovascular measures successfully differentiated between the two groups. Notably, this research also tested computerized voice stress analysis and found that vocal measures provided by the TrusterPro system were shown to be invalid for the detection of guilty knowledge, contributing important findings about the limitations of certain deception detection technologies.

Rill was part of a highly productive research team at Mainz that made significant contributions to forensic psychophysiology during the late 1990s and early 2000s. His personal website documents numerous conference presentations on topics including the effects of electrodermal lability, different test formats, and stimulus presentation modes (written versus pictorial) on psychophysiological responses in deception detection paradigms. His collaborative work examined how individual differences in physiological responsiveness and various methodological factors influenced the accuracy of the Guilty Knowledge Test.

Rill's research bridges experimental psychology, psychophysiology, and forensic science. His work on the Guilty Knowledge Test contributed to the scientific understanding of concealed information detection, a paradigm that detects crime-relevant knowledge rather than attempting to directly identify lies. This approach, which measures recognition of crime details through physiological responses, represents a more scientifically defensible alternative to traditional comparison question polygraph techniques, particularly for applications in criminal investigations.