In fact, Charles Judd, the editor of the Journal, already announced that the issue of JPSP which will contain the referred paper will have an editorial in which some doubts are expressed, and moreover an invitation to all the investigartors interested in the topic to try to replicate the data.
The author of the paper, Daryl Bem, prof. at Cornell University, New York, USA, is anyway sure about his results, and also the reviewers themselves didn't find any fawl in his work. Now it's necessary only to replicate the results to see if they are generalizable. To download the final version of the paper (still unpublished), click here.
Basically, Bem made 9 experiments in which some classical paradigms used in research in cognitive psychology are temporally inverted: for example, to evaluate the affective priming, instead of using the usual sequence of prime word and image, which the subject had to judge as fast as possible in terms of positive or negative affective meaning, he presented in his experiments first the target image to be judged, collecting the data of the reaction times of the subject, and then the prime word. The same he did for the other time-reversed experiments, with annexed resulting significant percentage of hits not caused by chance (that would be a 50%):
- Approach/avoidance
1. Precognitive Detection of Erotic Stimuli: 53.1%
2. Precognitive Avoidance of Negative Stimuli: 53.5% - Affective priming
3. Retroactive Priming I: 60.8% (percent. obtained with the classical priming: 64.9%)
4. Retroactive Priming II: 59.6% (percent. obtained with the classical priming: 61.6%) - Habituation
5. Retroactive Habituation I: 53.1%
6. Retroactive Habituation II: 51.8%
7. Retroactive Induction of Boredom: not significantly different from chance, 49.1% (the author said that this occurred because to induce boredom he used supraliminal exposures of images) - Facilitation of recall (they use another measure of accuracy, defined differential recall (DR), which weights the actual recalled words subtracting the control ones and ranking from -100% and +100%, positive DR% denote more recalled target words than control ones)
8. Retroactive Facilitation of Recall I: DR=2.27%
9. Retroactive Facilitation of Recall II: DR=4.21%
We know that some theories postulate that matter always take two directions: forward and backward...but still I cannot figure out how can it be received and perceived from the cognitive system: if the sent information has the same nature either when it goes backward and forward, then the information coming back from the future must be perceived within the same brain substrate that perceives the forward one...therefore, how can we differentiate? And, more importantly, why it doesn't happen always but it looks like some people (if true) have this ability more developed than others? If the information is the same, we should not TRAIN in order to be able to process it, it should come natural.
Click on the following link to read the original article: "Sentire il futuro": esperimenti su precognizione dividono gli scienziati (articolo in italiano).
