Citation

Physiological reactions to incoming stimuli can occur without perceptual and cognitive encoding. This paper reports the results of two experiments aimed at investigating heart rate differences in participants on viewing targets and nontargets in classical clairvoyance and precognition forced-choice tasks. We opted for very easy decision-making tasks instead of using violent/erotic pictures in order to find a scientific paradigm that may also be extended to children. The task consisted of a serial presentation of 4 calm pictures; participants had to guess which picture would be randomly selected as a target. The target was selected automatically by a pseudorandom algorithm. In the clairvoyance condition, targets were selected before participants did the trials; in the precognition one, targets were determined right after participants had made their choice. For each picture presentation, a sample of 10 heart rate data points was collected. The experiments involved 12 participants who together contributed 240 trials. Results were significant in both experiments: heart rate associated with targets increased at a statistically significant level compared to nontargets. The present results lend support to the hypothesis that heart rate may be a reliable physiological variable to detect ESP cognitive information even if overt target identification is at chance.