Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect.

TLDR

Psi refers to unexplained anomalous information or energy transfer, including precognition and premonition, which represent a broader retroactive influence of future events on present cognitive or affective responses, a phenomenon that remains controversial and subject to ongoing debate. The study reports nine experiments that test retroactive influence by time‑reversing established psychological effects to obtain responses before the putative causal stimuli. Data are presented for four time‑reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and avoidance of negative stimuli, retroactive priming, retroactive habituation, and retroactive facilitation of recall. Across all experiments the mean effect size was 0.22, with all but one yielding significant results, and stimulus‑seeking individuals—an extraversion component—showed a larger effect size of 0.43 in five experiments.

Abstract

The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual's current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by "time-reversing" well-established psychological effects so that the individual's responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The mean effect size (d) in psi performance across all 9 experiments was 0.22, and all but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.