Exploring precognition using a repetition priming paradigm

Controversy has emerged recently over claims that future practice could retroactively facilitate explicit recall in the here and now, with attempts to replicate such findings leading to inconsistent results. Here it is proposed that one possibility for such ambiguous and conflicting findings is that an explicit recall paradigm may be less sensitive to the subtle effects of such phenomena in comparison to an implicit repetition priming paradigm, as this does not rely on conscious processes. In addition, manipulation of a traditional repetition priming paradigm provides an opportunity to address the additional question of whether a single future repetition or multiple future repetitions of a stimulus would be needed to elicit a retroactive facilitation in implicit priming, or more simply a precognitive priming effect. Pilot work led to the development of a functional classification task and this was subsequently used to measure possible precognitive priming effects of 102 native English speakers. The data showed no evidence of precognitive priming when stimuli were repeated only once in the future. However, multiple future repetitions, whilst having no effect on response latencies, did elicit an effect on accuracy such that participants were more accurate when responding to stimuli that would be repeated four times in the future compared to stimuli that were not repeated. The results are discussed and some speculative possibilities are offered. Nevertheless, the lack of robust precognitive priming effects for both response times and accuracy means that such a result needs to be interpreted with caution.