We use the term (Sub)liminal Salience Search (SSS) to describe humans' extraordinary capacity to “preconsciously locate" stimuli that are salient to them, with the locating being in time as well as space. A particularly compelling demonstration is Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), in which the vast majority of stimuli presented are not perceived sufficiently to make them reportable (hence the term (sub)liminal), while salient ones breakthrough into consciousness and can be recalled (hence the term search). Importantly, although we may experience RSVP as a jumble of “overlaid” visual stimuli, perceptual processing is highly selective, as indicated by high identification [Craston et al; 2009] and signal detection [Bowman et al; 2013] accuracies, which even carry over to detecting the meaning of images [Potter, 1976; Potter et al, 2014]. Within a sequence of stimuli presented via RSVP, salient stimuli can be detected using the third positivity of the Brain’s electrical response (the so-called P3), which indexes a stimulus breaking into consciousness. RSVP, then, gives us a means to present many stimuli to an individual and determine which were found salient using EEG. The resulting Fringe-P3 method [Bowman et al; 2013] can be used in detecting deception, and specifically as a concealed information test.

Furthermore, the pre-conscious nature of search in RSVP makes the Fringe-P3 method especially resilient to conscious strategies to confound the deception detector, so called, countermeasures. We demonstrated this by showing that the Fringe-P3 identity detector is indeed resilient to countermeasures [Bowman et al; 2014]. We will also discuss our recent findings that when presented in RSVP, famous faces, famous names, familiar faces, familiar places and own email address, break into awareness and that such breakthrough can be detected with EEG on a per-individual basis. This suggests that the Fringe-P3 method can be applied across a variety of forensics settings, e.g. face composite systems, line-ups, demonstrating familiarity to compatriots, crime-relevant locations or online identifies.