Mind/machine interaction consortium: Port REG replication experiments - Parapsychological Abstracts

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 2002 by Sally R. Feather

JAHN, R., DUNNE, B., BRADISH, G., DOBYNS, Y., LETTIERI, A., NELSON, R., MISCHO, J., BOLLER, E., BOSCH, H., VAITL, D., HOUTKOOPER, J., AND WALTER, B. (2000). Mind/machine interaction consortium: Port REG replication experiments. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 14, 499-555.

A consortium of research groups at Freiburg, Giessen, and Princeton was formed in 1996 to pursue multidiciplinary studies of mind/machine interaction anomalies. The first collaborative project undertaken was an attempted replication of prior Princeton experiments that had demonstrated anomalous deviations of the outputs of electronic random event generators in correlation with prestated intentions of human operators. For this replication, each of the 3 participating laboratories collected data from 250 x 3,000-trial x 200 binary-sample experimental sessions, generated by 227 human operators. Identical noise-source equipment was used throughout, and essentially similar protocols and data analysis procedures were followed. Data were binned in terms of operator intention to increase the mean of the 200-binary-sample distributions (HI), to decrease the mean (LO), or not to attempt any influence. Contiguous unattended calibrations were carried forward throughout. The agreed-on primary criterion for the anomalous e ffect was the magnitude of the HI-LO data separation, but data also were collected on a number of secondary correlates. The primary result of this replication effort was that whereas the overall HI-LO mean separations proceeded in the intended direction at all 3 laboratories, the overall sizes of these deviations failed by an order of magnitude to attain that of the prior experiments or to achieve any persuasive level of statistical significance. However, various portions of the data displayed a substantial number of interior structural anomalies in such features as a reduction in trial-level standard deviations; irregular series-position patterns; and differential dependencies on various secondary parameters, such as feedback type or experimental run length, to a composite extent well beyond chance expectation. The change from the systematic, intention-correlated mean shifts found in the prior studies to this polyglot pattern of structural distortions testifies to inadequate understanding of the basic phenom ena involved and suggests a need for more sophisticated experiments and theoretical models for their further elucidation.

--Author's abstract