A Forced-choice Precognition Experiment with Selected Cohorts

Objective. We report a pre-registered forced-choice precognition study to test a novel collaborative platform for psi experimentation. The study compared a cohort of experienced meditators and a cohort selected merely for its interest in participating in the study. Method. The Internet-based platform, Psi@Home, was developed to allow participants to contribute at-home experimental sessions using custom software. Each session comprised 20 forced-choice trials. Eighty sessions per cohort were collected for the pre-registered study and the hypotheses for each cohort were the increase relative to MCE of: 1) the variance of session hit rates, and of 2) the total hit rate. A third hypothesis predicted a higher variance of session hit rates for the meditator cohort. Hypothesis 1 was confirmatory and the others were exploratory. Results. Only hypothesis 3 was confirmed (p = .03). However, 90 tryout sessions showed a markedly strong increase of session variance (p = .00003). Conclusion. We successfully tested a novel platform for collaborative psi experiments. Two pre-registered cohort studies found no direct evidence for a psi effect. However, for tryout data whose collection was specified in pre-registration using the same participants and protocol, variance across sessions was highly significant. Differences in participant attitudes during the two periods of data collection may account for the discrepancy.