As the great Carl Sagan once put it, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”*. And as far as extraordinary claims go, suggesting that humans can possess psychic abilities is a pretty big one. But in 2011, that was the claim that was made in a famous psychology paper by Daryl Bem at Cornell University in New York.
In a basic memory experiment, the setup might be something like this. First, you give a group of participants a list of words to remember. Once they’ve had chance to try and commit the list to memory, you might give them a bit of a break, or ask them to do some sort of distractor task. Finally, you then give them a larger list of words – some of which they saw in the original list, some of which are new – and get them to say whether they recognise the words or not.
Is your memory as accurate as you think it is?
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Bem’s study flipped this idea on its head across a number of different experiments. In one such test, he got participants to read a list of 48 words, and then immediately asked them to write down as many as they could remember. Then, he gave the participants a random subset of 24 words from the original 48, and asked them to type them out on a computer screen. In other words, the recall session came before the practice session. At face value, Bem’s findings were remarkable: he reported that in the initial recall test, participants seemed better at remembering words that they would see in the later practice session, than words that they wouldn’t see later on. In other words, people were better at recalling words that they would be told to remember in the future.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/hea ... -abilities
In a basic memory experiment, the setup might be something like this. First, you give a group of participants a list of words to remember. Once they’ve had chance to try and commit the list to memory, you might give them a bit of a break, or ask them to do some sort of distractor task. Finally, you then give them a larger list of words – some of which they saw in the original list, some of which are new – and get them to say whether they recognise the words or not.
Is your memory as accurate as you think it is?
Read more
Bem’s study flipped this idea on its head across a number of different experiments. In one such test, he got participants to read a list of 48 words, and then immediately asked them to write down as many as they could remember. Then, he gave the participants a random subset of 24 words from the original 48, and asked them to type them out on a computer screen. In other words, the recall session came before the practice session. At face value, Bem’s findings were remarkable: he reported that in the initial recall test, participants seemed better at remembering words that they would see in the later practice session, than words that they wouldn’t see later on. In other words, people were better at recalling words that they would be told to remember in the future.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/hea ... -abilities