The perceived significance of a stimulus to an organism, and is related to the concept of salience. Significant stimuli (those with signal value) can elicit physiological responses, and greater signal value corresponds with greater response magnitude. External significance is assigned to a stimulus when it appears to differ from others based on appearance. In polygraphy, this could be when a test question is much longer or is read in a louder tone of voice. Internal significance is assigned to a stimulus due to its meaning. An objective of a CQT examination is to make the external significance of relevant and comparison questions appear equal, and for their internal significance to vary. An innocent examinee would be expected to find higher internal significance in the comparison questions, whereas the relevant questions would hold higher internal significance for the deceptive. See: Handler & Honts (2007).
