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Precognitive priming and sequential effects in visual word recognition
Roderick Garton
B.A. (Macquarie University, N.S.W.), B.A. (Hons.) (University of Tasmania)
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science within the
School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology, University of
Tasmania, Hobart, Australia.
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Statements
Statement of originality
I declare that this thesis presents my own original work and contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by any university or other institution, except by way of background information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my knowledge and belief no material previously published or written by another person, except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis, nor does the thesis contain any material that infringes copyright.
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Statement of probity
I declare that the original experimental research reported in this thesis is based on analyses of data that, to the best of my knowledge, were exactly as participants freely contributed them and as accurately recorded at the time of contribution, and that any hypothesis of data-manipulation, whether befitting or not the hypotheses, is wholly untrue to the strict probity by which this research was fully intended and came to be conducted at all of its stages of production.
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Statement on authority of access
This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968.
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Statement of ethical conduct
The research associated with this thesis abides by the international and Australian codes on human experimentation. It received approval from the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania) Network (Application H0008548). All participants completed consent forms approved by the Committee upon being informed of the nature of the experimental tasks to which they contributed.
Acknowledgements
Notwithstanding the statement of originality, this thesis has benefited from supervision by the following members of staff in the School of Psychology, University of Tasmania. I thank my supervisors for their expert input over the duration of my candidature. I also acknowledge the approval by the School’s Research Committee to proceed with such fundamental research as is here reported.
Supervisors
Dr. Walter L. Slaghuis
Dr. John A. Davidson
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Preamble
Psi research (encompassing parapsychology and psychical research) increasingly offers the following proposition: Future information that persons have not or could not have inferred or incurred on the
basis of past information can inform their present experience and behaviour. Summarily, this is the
hypothesis of precognition. This is not precognition of the usually suspected type. It is not of the dream that occasionally literally matches, in the bulk of its most salient details, an experience had soon upon awakening. It is not of the once-in-a-lifetime portent of death, with an unreasonable but a true idea of its hour. The hypothesis that is being increasingly offered, in psi research, is that precognition normatively functions in perception and cognition as it is classically conceived – not in anomalous experiences, not as supernatural or paranormal happenings, but as information that ordinary perception and cognition utilizes if not depends upon. It is this normative frameworking of precognition in particular, and psi hypotheses in general, that is pursued in this thesis, and specifically of precognition as it is operative in recognition.
There is what might be called a pan-paradigmatic implication of this frameworking of psi hypotheses – specifically, what it implies for the enduring question of the place of psi research within psychology; the question of “What to do about ESP”?, as E. G. Boring (1966, p. 42), the historian of
psychology, posed in Science; and the question of “How does one decide about ESP?” as J. B. Rhine
(1959, p. 606), the founding US parapsychologist, posed to his peers in American Psychologist. Experimental evidence for the operation of extra-sensory perception (ESP), and psi phenomena in general, has been repeatedly offered to the attention of psychologists, in their own journals. These include experimental reports by, for example, Alexander (2000), Bierman and Radin (1997), Haraldsson and Houtkooper (1992), Koren and Persinger (2002), McConnell, Snowdon, and Powell (1955), McDonough, Warren, and Don (1992), Roll, Persinger, Webster, Tiller, and Cook (2002), Schmeidler and Murphy (1946), Thouless (1942), and Watt and Morris (1995); and also interpretive and meta-analytical reviews of particular experimental series, such as by Bem and Honorton (1994), Bösch, Steinkamp, and Boller (2006), Burt (1961), Cadoret (1961), Child (1985), Milton and Wiseman (1999), Murphy (1975), K. R. Rao and Palmer (1987), J. B. Rhine (1936), Sargent (1981), Sherwood and Roe (2003), Storm and Ertel (2001), and Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio (2010). (It might be noted that an APA president, and three BPS presidents, figure among these authors.) Responding to such reports has involved many unscientific but abiding approaches – “the Seven Veils” to psi, it seems: (1) ignore them; (2) distort their reporting; (3) object to their thinkability; (4) ever reject their evidentiality; (5) dismiss them as trivial; (6) suspend judgement until on-demand
heat-boils-water replicability is assured in a crucial experiment; and (7) conform and reduce them to
more reasonable hypotheses of sensorimotor, cognitive and neuropsychological aberration, i.e., altogether explain them away by any superficially valid hypothesis of classical psychology at hand. No psychologists would suffer isolation if they decided to take up such positions, to withdraw behind these veils; they would have therebehind, as companions, Skinner, Boring, Wundt, Ellis, Hilgard and Hyman (not only the abiding antagonist of psi research, but the discoverer of the repetition effect in choice reaction-time studies, of which more below).
The offer of precognition as a normative operation opens up a new and more scientifically worthy approach to the question of what to do about ESP, and how to decide about it. That is – to question the
evidence for psi according to its informativeness to psychological propositions, methods and findings.
Naturally, this requires, perhaps more than ever before, that psi research itself be well informed by the psychological. Fundamentally, and quite simply, in such a proposition as raised above, we are being invited to appreciate psi research as research into what the philosopher C. D. Broad (1949) called the
iv Without an awareness that [temporal] linearity is a part of psychology's metaphysic, psychological researchers cannot be accused of confounding this assumption with their method. Yet, their method may incorporate linear time in a way that prohibits any true test of its validity. (Slife, 1995, p. 60)
What psi research offers, extra to such philosophy, are theoretical frameworks, experimental methods, and a vast database of findings relevant to questioning such limiting assumptions, and posing such fundamental questions. Perhaps in the days of Wundt, Boring, Skinner, and so on, as psychology was still asserting itself as a science, it was important to protect psychology from such fundamental queries, and the Seven Veils were quite academically functional even if scientifically unconscionable. Having passed over this challenge, and seeing that the questions of psi research have evolved into questions of its normative informativeness, psychology’s capacity to be informed by such fundamental enquiry is now itself in critical scientific question.
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Abstract
The proposition that psi is operative not as an anomaly but as a normative component of information processing was investigated, focusing on the normative operation of precognition. Distinct to prior paradigms of precognition research that measure exact identification of stimuli, it was considered most informative, for the proposition of psi’s normativeness, to investigate its operation as a context effect, and, specifically, as priming and sequential effects.
Evidence for psi’s operation as a priming effect was firstly examined, and a priming paradigm involving continuous lexical decision was deemed, on the basis of prior research, to be potentially informative. As to what information could be precognitively primed, the question of retrieval, under a precognition condition, of imaginal and ideational information was addressed, in Experiment 1, in the form of post-response orthographic and semantic priming. Together with observations of classical past-to-present priming, precognitive semantic priming was observed, as was precognitive orthographic priming involving nonwords, in the speed and, partially, the accuracy of lexical decisions. Discussion related the results to theories of visual word recognition as well as precognition.
Precognition as a sequential effect was then examined. Using data from a prior experiment in lexical decision that sensitised accuracy over speed as the relevant measure, a precognitive alternation effect was observed in the presence of a classical repetition effect; specifically, responses to words were more accurate when the prior stimulus was a word, and when the subsequent (“precognitive”) stimulus was a nonword, while responses to nonwords showed no reliable sequential effects. The possible role of sequential artefacts in randomly allocating targets and conditions was examined but found not to disconfirm the precognition hypothesis, while meriting further study. A third experiment sought to replicate this ostensibly precognitive alternation effect in lexical decision latency, while also manipulating nonword lexicality so as to identify a psychological basis for the effect that would conceptually, rather than statistically, preclude the operation of randomisation artefacts. The precognitive alternation effect was again observed – but (again) only in error-rate, and only on word trials. No nonword lexicality effect, and no artefacts of randomisation, appeared to modulate this effect. In the classical direction of sequences, word and nonword repetition effects were observed, modulated by nonword lexicality. These findings again merited discussion in relation to theories of both visual word recognition and precognition.
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Contents
Main headings
Abstract ... v
1.
Normative precognition ... 11
2.
Priming effects ... 25
3.
Sequential effects ... 94
4.
General discussion ... 129
5.
Appendices ... 136
6.
References ... 136
Details
Statements ... ii
Preamble ... iii
Abstract ... v
List of tables ... ix
List of figures ... x
1.
Normative precognition ... 11
1.1
Observing anomalies of prediction ... 11
1.2
Proposing the normative operation of psi ... 13
1.3
Evidencing precognition ... 18
1.3.1
Case investigation ... 19
1.3.2
Forced-choice testing ... 19
1.3.2.1
Run-wise tests ... 19
1.3.2.2
Trial-by-trial tests... 20
1.3.2.3
Displacement tests ... 21
1.3.3
Free-response testing ... 22
1.3.4
Appraising the paradigms ... 22
1.3.5
Developing the paradigms ... 23
2.
Priming effects ... 25
2.1
Psiological priming effects ... 25
2.1.1
Imaginal information ... 25
2.1.1.1
Primacy of pattern recognition (Irwin) ... 25
2.1.1.2
Informational load/target-complexity ... 27
2.1.1.3
Visual encoding in the structural properties of responses ... 30
2.1.1.4
Imaginal context effects ... 34
2.1.2
Ideational information ... 36
2.1.2.1
Imaginal elaboration, not primacy (Osty and Tyrrell) ... 36
2.1.2.2
Ideational, not imaginal, associationism (Carington) ... 38
2.1.2.3
Ideational context effects ... 40
2.1.3
Imaginal and ideational contexts compared ... 43
2.1.4
Primed choice response tasks... 44
2.1.4.1
Stroop-based tasks ... 44
2.1.4.2
Primed lexical and evaluative decisions ... 46
2.2
Psychological priming effects ... 51
2.2.1
The Multiple Read-Out Model (MROM) ... 52
2.2.2
Application to psiological situations ... 54
2.3
Experiment 1: Structural and semantic precognitive priming ... 57
2.3.1
Hypotheses ... 58
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2.3.2.1
Design ... 58
2.3.2.2
Participants ... 59
2.3.2.3
Materials ... 59
2.3.2.4
Procedure ... 62
2.3.3
Results ... 64
2.3.3.1
Data-consolidation ... 64
2.3.3.2
Assumptions ... 65
2.3.3.3
Analysis... 66
2.3.3.4
Summary ... 73
2.3.4
Discussion ... 73
2.3.4.1
Classical (past-based) quality and context effects ... 73
2.3.4.2
Precognitive (future-based) quality and context effects ... 75
2.3.4.3
Interpreting the normative operation of psi ... 77
2.3.4.4
Explanations alternative to psi ... 82
2.3.4.5
Summary/Further research ... 93
3.
Sequential effects ... 94
3.1
Psiological sequential effects ... 95
3.1.1
Goodfellow’s study ... 95
3.1.2
Tyrrell’s studies ... 96
3.1.3
Palmer’s studies ... 97
3.1.4
Displacement, with reinforcement ... 98
3.1.5
Match/mismatch contingency (Soal’s and Pratt’s studies) ... 99
3.1.6
Summary ... 100
3.2
Psychological sequential effects ... 102
3.2.1
Patterns ... 103
3.2.2
Interpretations ... 104
3.3
Experiment 2: Sequential effects on lexical decision accuracy ... 105
3.3.1
Hypotheses ... 106
3.3.2
Method ... 106
3.3.2.1
Design ... 106
3.3.2.2
Participants ... 107
3.3.2.3
Materials ... 107
3.3.2.4
Procedure ... 107
3.3.3
Results ... 108
3.3.3.1
Data-consolidation ... 108
3.3.3.2
Assumptions ... 108
3.3.3.3
Analysis... 108
3.3.4
Discussion ... 112
3.3.4.1
Classical (past-based) effects ... 112
3.3.4.2
Precognitive (future-based) effects ... 113
3.4
Experiment 3: Sequential effects on lexical decision latency and accuracy ... 116
3.4.1
Hypotheses ... 116
3.4.2
Method ... 117
3.4.2.1
Design ... 117
3.4.2.2
Participants ... 117
3.4.2.3
Materials ... 117
3.4.2.4
Procedure ... 118
3.4.3
Results ... 119
3.4.3.1
Data-consolidation ... 119
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3.4.3.3
Analysis... 120
3.4.4
Discussion ... 124
3.4.4.1
Classical (past-based) effects ... 125
3.4.4.2
Artefacts of statistical cues and randomization ... 125
3.4.4.3
Precognitive (future-based) effects ... 127
4.
General discussion ... 129
4.1
The primed-and-timed context effect paradigm ... 129
4.1.1
Reliability and power ... 129
4.1.2
Informativeness ... 131
4.2
Implications for understanding the evidence for precognition ... 133
4.3
Concluding remarks ... 134
5.
Appendices ... 136
5.1
Stimulus materials ... 136
5.1.1
Stimulus materials used in Experiment 1... 136
5.1.2
Stimulus materials used in Experiment 3... 139
5.2
Experiment 1 program ... 141
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List of tables
Table 1. Means (SDs) for priming relevant factors among WW pairs. ... 61
Table 2. Sample rows from the stimulus file. ... 62
Table 3. Exclusion criteria and proportions. ... 65
Table 4. Word responses in relation to future words (Ww): Descriptive statistics. ... 67
Table 5. Word responses in relation to prior words (wW): Descriptive statistics. ... 68
Table 6. Word responses in relation to future nonwords (Wn): Descriptive statistics. ... 69
Table 7. Nonword responses in relation to future words (Nw): Descriptive statistics. ... 69
Table 8. Nonword responses in relation to future nonwords (Nn): Descriptive statistics. ... 70
Table 9. Word responses in relation to prior nonwords (nW): Descriptive statistics. ... 70
Table 10. Nonword responses in relation to prior words (wN): Descriptive statistics. ... 71
Table 11. Nonword responses in relation to prior nonwords (nN): Descriptive statistics. ... 71
Table 12. Correlation coefficients of RT (upper half) and ER (lower half) priming effects. ... 72
Table 13. Data-patterns supporting controlled vs. automatic bases to sequential effects. ... 102
Table 14. Error-rate (%) results from Experiment 2. ... 110
Table 15. Effect-sizes (rz) for precognition and related paradigms. ... 130
Table 16. Word-Word stimuli for Experiment 1. ... 136
Table 17. Word-Nonword stimuli for Experiment 1. ... 137
Table 18. Nonword-Word stimuli for Experiment 1. ... 138
Table 19. Nonword-Nonword stimuli for Experiment 1. ... 138
Table 20. Word stimuli for Experiment 3. ... 139
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List of figures
Figure 1. Dishabituation in rats of startle to tone by flash. From Groves & Thompson (1970). ... 11
Figure 2. . Orientation in skin conductance to noise prior to noise-onset (averaged from 125 participants/sessions and over 1000 stimulus and control events). From Spottiswoode and May (2003). ... 12
Figure 3. Classic (Rhinean) precognition procedure... 19
Figure 4. Precognitive identity of “target” and “response” datasets with a +1 lag of trial indices. ... 21
Figure 5. Hits-per-symbol of all correct. ... 29
Figure 6. Hits-per-presented symbol. ... 29
Figure 7. Suggestions of structural encoding in “free-response” ESP. ... 32
Figure 8. Three conditions of size-cueing in the Delboeuf phenomenon by sender and subliminal percipient stimuli, as used by Kreitler & Kreitler (1973). ... 34
Figure 9. Degraded and clear pictorial and verbal stimuli used in Blackmore (1981a). ... 43
Figure 10. Repetition priming of nonwords over sessions in Dienes' study. Based on Ertel (1994). ... 49
Figure 11. A Bullwinkle experiment... 51
Figure 12. Response-box used in Experiments 1, 2 and 3. ... 62
Figure 13. Trial (NW) sequence with low S2 quality for Exp. 1. ... 63
Figure 14. Example of normal contrast nonword and degraded contrast word. ... 63
Figure 15. Response-times and error-rates, with SEs, to S1 per relatedness with, and quality of, S2. .. 67
Figure 16. Response-times and error-rates, with SEs, to S2 per relatedness with S1 and quality of S2. 68 Figure 17. Decisional flow-chart for defining ostensibly BLP-contravening events, based on arguments in Broad (1949). ... 82
Figure 18. Observed and expected log frequencies for length of gaps between structurally related letter-strings. ... 90
Figure 19. On-trial matches and repetitions (R) and alternations (A) of the +1 target. ... 98
Figure 20. Two trials; NW sequence as used in Exp. 2. ... 107
Figure 21. Classical lexical decision ERs upon repetition (aA) and alternation (bA) (mean %/P + SE). ... 109
Figure 22. Precognitive lexical decision ERs ahead of repetition (Aa) and alternation (Ab) (mean %/P + SE). ... 110
Figure 23. Classical lexical decision ERs upon extended repetitions and/or alternations (mean %/P + SE). ... 111
Figure 24. Precognitive lexical decision ERs ahead of extended repetitions and/or alternations (mean %/P + SE). ... 111
Figure 25. Past-to-present sequential effects in ER bias in WWW (N = 17) and WWN (N = 21) counts per run. ... 115
Figure 26. Precognitive sequential effects in ER by bias in WWW (N = 17) and WWN (N = 21) counts per run. ... 115
Figure 27. Two trials, NW sequence, as used in Exp. 3. ... 119
Figure 28. Classical first-order sequential effects on response-times to words and nonwords per low/high nonword lexicality. ... 121
Figure 29. Classical first-order sequential effects on error-rates to words and nonwords per low/high nonword lexicality. ... 122
Figure 30. Precognitive first-order sequential effects on response-times to words and nonwords per low/high nonword lexicality. ... 123
