CIT Testing in Cheshire
How the service runs locally.
Cheshire is where we are. Deception Detection UK is based at 7 Chelford Road, Handforth, and the whole county is within easy reach, from Wilmslow and Macclesfield in the east to Chester and Ellesmere Port in the west. The examiner comes to the person being tested: there is no clinic to attend, and tests are not carried out at our address.
A Concealed Information Test measures whether a person's brain recognises a specific detail they have not been told, using an EEG cap and a simple on-screen task. This page covers the service in Cheshire. The method is explained in the CIT testing guide.
Areas We Cover
Coverage includes Cheshire East, Cheshire West and Chester, Warrington and Halton, and the neighbouring edges of Greater Manchester, Derbyshire and Staffordshire.
- Handforth
- Wilmslow
- Alderley Edge
- Macclesfield
- Knutsford
- Congleton
- Sandbach
- Crewe
- Nantwich
- Northwich
- Winsford
- Chester
- Ellesmere Port
- Warrington
We also travel to Stockport, Altrincham, Buxton and Stoke-on-Trent. If your address is not listed, ask: the examiner comes to you, so the list is a guide and not a boundary.
Where the Test Takes Place
At home, or in a private room arranged near you.
Most Cheshire tests are home visits, including village and rural addresses. The room needs to be quiet, with a table, a chair and a socket, for about ninety minutes. Because the travelling is short, Cheshire appointments are the simplest for us to arrange once the word lists have been agreed.
In a small town or village, discretion matters to people. The examiner arrives as an ordinary visitor, and nothing about the visit identifies its purpose. If you would still prefer the test to take place away from home, we arrange a private meeting room in a nearby town.
What You Need Before Booking
The requirement is the same everywhere, and it is the one most cases fail.
A CIT needs at least one specific detail that the person would know only if they were involved, and that they have not been told, shown or asked about. A name, a place, an object or an amount can all work. A general suspicion cannot, because there is nothing in it to recognise. Two or three separate details make a stronger test than one.
The person to be tested must agree and gives written consent on the day. The full requirements, with a checklist, are on the who qualifies for a CIT test page. If no detail is known, read about the searching CIT and its limits before going further.
A Local Example of a Word List
Illustrative only. Real lists are written for each case.
Suppose the detail being tested is a village, and the true answer is Prestbury. The person would see that item mixed in with five alternatives, Tarporley, Audlem, Frodsham, Malpas and Bunbury, and would be asked to press a different key whenever Lymm appeared. Each item is shown around thirty times in shuffled order.
A person who has lived in Cheshire all their life will know most of these places. The list works as long as none of them carries special meaning for that person, so anywhere they live, work, drink or have family is taken out and replaced.
The step-by-step account of what happens next, from recording to result, is on the how CIT testing works page.
What the Test Can and Cannot Tell You
The same limits apply in Cheshire as anywhere else.
A CIT can show that a detail is recognised, or that there is no sign of recognition in a recording that passed its quality check. It cannot test a bare accusation, it cannot tell innocent knowledge from guilty knowledge, and it does not prove what a person did. People can also be taught techniques that weaken the test; research published in 2004 showed this for the protocol we use.
Published laboratory studies of P300-based CITs commonly report detection of 80 to 95 per cent of people who hold the tested information. Those are laboratory figures and are not results from our own testing, and field validation is limited. If you are weighing this against a conventional lie detector, the CIT test vs polygraph comparison sets out the differences, and relationship cases are covered on the page about CIT testing for a suspected cheating partner.
The Legal Position in Cheshire
What the law does and does not say.
Cheshire is in England, under the law of England and Wales. Polygraph testing has a statutory use in that jurisdiction for supervising some offenders on licence, and section 30 of the Offender Management Act 2007 prevents the results of those sessions being used in evidence against the person in proceedings for an offence. The CIT has no statutory scheme. It is a private, voluntary test, and we make no claim that a result is admissible in any court or tribunal.
Booking a CIT Test in Cheshire
What happens after you get in touch.
You can book online or ask a question first. We will ask what happened, what the person to be tested has and has not been told, and who else knows. If a sound test can be built, we draft the word lists with you and then agree a date and place in Cheshire. If it cannot, we will say so before any appointment is made.