Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's ‘Retroactive Facilitation of Recall’ Effect

Stuart J. Ritchie; Richard Wiseman; Christopher C. French

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033423

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's ‘Retroactive Facilitation of Recall’ Effect

Stuart J. Ritchie ,

* E-mail: stuartjritchie1@gmail.com

Affiliation Psychology Department, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
⨯
Richard Wiseman,

Affiliation School of Psychology, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, United Kingdom
⨯
Christopher C. French

Affiliation Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, United Kingdom
⨯

Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's ‘Retroactive Facilitation of Recall’ Effect

Stuart J. Ritchie,
Richard Wiseman,
Christopher C. French

Published: March 14, 2012
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0033423

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A better replication: Repeat tasks with above chance performers

Posted by avjaeggi on 16 Mar 2012 at 00:38 GMT

Why not do the following: Take the subjects who were performing above chance in Bem's experiments and test them again (and again, and again) on the same and different tasks? If there's something to psi, then surely these subjects should show it repeatedly. If that's the case, one could actually start getting at the mechanisms, e.g. by putting them in an fMRI scanner. If there's nothing to it, then the failure to replicate the results in the same subjects will demonstrate this conclusively

No competing interests declared.

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Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's ‘Retroactive Facilitation of Recall’ Effect

Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's ‘Retroactive Facilitation of Recall’ Effect

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A better replication: Repeat tasks with above chance performers

Posted by avjaeggi on 16 Mar 2012 at 00:38 GMT