CIT Testing in Manchester
How the service runs locally.
Manchester is our home ground. Deception Detection UK is based at Handforth in Cheshire, around ten miles south of Manchester city centre, so appointments across Greater Manchester involve less travelling than anywhere else we cover and are usually the easiest to schedule.
A Concealed Information Test, or CIT, measures whether a person's brain recognises a specific detail that they have not been told, using an EEG cap and a short on-screen task. It is not a polygraph and it does not ask accusing questions. This page covers how the service runs in Manchester. The method itself is explained in the CIT testing guide.
Areas We Cover
Greater Manchester is ten boroughs, and we cover all of them. The southern side of the conurbation, including Stockport, Trafford and Wythenshawe, is closest to our base.
- Manchester city centre
- Didsbury
- Chorlton
- Withington
- Fallowfield
- Levenshulme
- Wythenshawe
- Salford
- Sale
- Altrincham
- Stretford
- Stockport
- Ashton-under-Lyne
- Oldham
- Rochdale
- Bury
- Bolton
- Wigan
We also travel to Wilmslow, Macclesfield, Warrington and Glossop. 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 Manchester tests are home visits. The examiner needs a quiet room with a table, a chair and a socket, and about ninety minutes without interruptions. City-centre flats are fine provided the room can be kept quiet; if there is building-entry or visitor parking to arrange, tell us when you book.
Where home is not suitable, for instance in a shared house or where the two people involved live together and one needs to be elsewhere during the recording, we arrange a private meeting room near you instead. The person who booked the test waits outside the room while the recording runs.
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 district, and the true answer is Didsbury. The person would see that item mixed in with five alternatives, Chorlton, Prestwich, Urmston, Swinton and Denton, and would be asked to press a different key whenever Eccles appeared. Each item is shown around thirty times in shuffled order.
Someone who has lived in Manchester for years knows every one of these places, which is fine: what matters is that none of them means more to the person than the others. We would take out anywhere they live, work, grew up or have family, and replace it with a district of similar standing.
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 Manchester 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 Manchester
What the law does and does not say.
Manchester falls under the law of England and Wales. In that jurisdiction the polygraph has a statutory role in supervising certain offenders on licence, and section 30 of the Offender Management Act 2007 keeps what happens in those sessions out of criminal proceedings against the person tested. The CIT has no statutory scheme at all. It is a private, voluntary test, and we make no claim that its results are admissible in any court or tribunal, including the civil and family courts sitting in Manchester.
Booking a CIT Test in Manchester
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 Manchester. If it cannot, we will say so before any appointment is made.