Stage 1 Registered Report: Anomalous perception in a Ganzfeld condition - A meta-analysis of more than 40 years investigation

Abstract

This meta-analysis is an investigation into anomalous perception (i.e., conscious identification of information without any conventional sensorial means). The technique used for eliciting an effect is the ganzfeld condition (a form of sensory homogenization that eliminates distracting peripheral noise). The database consists of peer-reviewed studies published between January 1974 and June 2020 inclusive. The overall effect size will be estimated using a frequentist and a Bayesian random-effect model. Moderators analyses will be used to examine the influence of level of experience of participants, the type of task and the peer-review level. Publication bias will be estimated by using four different tests. Trend analysis will be conducted with a cumulative meta-analysis and a meta-regression model with Year of publication as covariate.

Stage 2 Registered Report: Anomalous perception in a Ganzfeld condition - A meta-analysis of more than 40 years investigation

“…The list of all references related to the included and excluded studies is available in the GZMAReference List file and the data used for all the following statistical analyses is available in the GZMADatabase1974_2020 file in the Underlying data ( Tressoldi & Storm, 2020 ).…”

“…The results of the cumulative meta-analysis are represented with a cumulative forest plot in Figure S2 ( Extended data ( Tressoldi & Storm, 2020 )). From the inspection of the cumulative forest plot, it emerges that the overall effect size stabilized around the cumulative evidence obtained up to 1997.…”

“…The complete database with all supporting information is available as Underlying data ( Tressoldi & Storm, 2020 ).…”

“…These calculations were implemented in the R statistical environment v.4.0.3 with the metafor package v. 2.4 ( Viechtbauer, 2017 ). See syntax details provided as extended data ( Tressoldi & Storm, 2020 ).…”

Follow‐up on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) remote viewing experiments☆

“…The targets of RV experiments (published in Nature , see Targ & Puthoff, 1974) contained specific meanings of interest to U.S. national security (e.g., the location of a secret military base) (see Utts, 1995, 1996, 2018). The present study focused on RV relative to anomalous information reception , as it is one of the most researched anomalous phenomena showing significant results (see Bem et al., 2016; Tressoldi & Storm, 2021). Unfortunately, the abbreviation for anomalous information reception (AIR) is the same as the abbreviation for the American Institutes for Research (also AIR) and we wish to prevent confusion.…”