Thursday, May 3, 2018   7:14 PM

Convention Spotlight: David Vernon Studies Precognitive Priming

Is it possible that completing a creative insight task in the future will help you complete such a task now? This is the question that David Vernon, a researcher from Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, England is attempting to answer. He is asking people to complete a number of trials using a standard compound remote associates task. This involves presenting a participant with three words (such as “cake,” “swiss,” and “cottage,” and asking them to come up with a fourth word that is associated with all three [“cheese” in this example]). The new word can pair either before (cheesecake) or after (cottage cheese) the three words. After the participants have completed all 20 trials, Vernon shows them the ”answers” to half of the trials and has them type in the answers–twice. The question is, does this post-test priming lead to a precognitive effect such that participants respond more accurately to the trials that are primed compared to those that are not? 

Learn more about the results of this study at the 61st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association this August at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California.

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