A FIELD VALIDATION STUDY OF THE QUADRI-ZONE COMPARISON TECHNIQUE Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the Polygraph Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences and Committee on National Statistics Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL of the National Academies SUMMARY:    The National Research Council (NRC) conducted a scientific review of the research literature on polygraph examinations pertaining to their validity and reliability with particular emphasis on personnel security screening. However the Council also reviewed the research literature pertaining to specific-issue polygraph examinations normally conducted in relation to criminal investigations.    Laboratory studies lack the basic emotions present in real-life cases, namely, fear of detection by the Guilty examinee, fear of error by the Innocent examinee, and anger by either party. Nevertheless the NRC found a median accuracy of 0.86 for the 52 data sets from laboratory studies.    A review of field research studies from actual real-life polygraph examinations that embody the emotions of fear of detection, fear of error and anger, revealed that only seven polygraph field studies passed the NRC’s minimal criteria for review. The seven data sets included between 25 and 122 polygraph examinations, with a median of 100 and a total of 582 tests. The accuracy index values ranged from 71.1% to 99.9% with a median value of 89%. It should be noted that the field study that attained the 99.9% accuracy with the largest number of polygraph examinations was the 1989 field study on the validity of the Quadri-Track Zone Comparison Technique published in Polygraph, journal of the American Polygraph Association, Volume 18, Nr. 4, 1989. The complete report may be found at www.national-academies.org.