Proposing a new approach and a rigorous cut-off value for identifying precognition

摘要

Precognition is the ability to anticipate the occurrence of events before they happen. Many critics claim that precognition has no theoretical and scientific plausibility and must be investigated through rigorous statistical proofs. Considering precognition as elusive and assuming that people should present random and precognition patterns when performing the classic protocols of the area, we proposed to apply the change point method to deal with this, conjointly searching for a rigorous cut-off value for identifying precognition. We simulated the Sequential Forced-Choice Precognition Task of five stimuli, as well nine types of relationships between random and precognition patterns. After inspecting 10,000 trials for each one of the different probabilities of precognition, we determined a cut-off value of 1.90. The change point method and the cut-off value showed to be effective for separating and classifying the random and precognition sequences of the simulated samples that possessed at least 30 trials for each sequence. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.