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An attempted replication of the PRL ganzfeld research - Psychophysical Research Laboratories - Autoganzfeld, part 2
Journal of Parapsychology, The, Sept, 1997 by Richard S. Broughton, Cheryl H. Alexander
Offsetting the good performance of the emotionally close series, however, was unexpectedly low scoring in the second of the two regular first-timer series. Apart from paying homage to the lab lore concerning what happens when one reports data part way through an experiment, there is little to speculate about concerning the decline in scoring during the final year of the experiment. One could invoke a decline in experimenter motivation or simple "burnout," or heightened anxiety to keep up the promising results already reported, and such elements were probably present to a degree. In that context it should be noted that C. H. A. served as the experimenter for virtually all of the 909 sessions over two and one-half years. In the PRL program, multiple experimenters were available and different experimenters took the lead at different times over the years. There is little objective evidence, however, to move any of these suggestions beyond the level of speculation. Bierman (Wezelman & Bierman, 1997) has reported similar declines in ganzfeld results following "exposure" of interim findings and suggests that these may be interpreted as being predicted by yon Lucadou's (1995) model of pragmatic information. We also found no evidence that the post-report decline could be explained by physical variables such as geomagnetism or LST.
Few of the previously reported correlates of high scoring received support in these data. The superiority of dynamic targets over static targets observed by Honorton et al. (1990) clearly received no support in these experiments, with the static targets producing insignificantly better scores. Practicing a mental discipline did not enhance scoring as in earlier work (Kanthamani & Broughton, 1994).
Receivers who reported that they had prior spontaneous psi experiences did do better than those who did not report psi experiences, which conforms to previous findings, but the difference was relatively small and nonsignificant. The notably good scoring by left-handed receivers suggests a possible link with brain hemisphere specialization, but further speculation must await a larger database since there were only 11 left-handers in the replication series. Apparently the PRL data did not include handedness, and we are not aware of any precursors to this finding in the ganzfeld literature.
In the overall replication data base, there was no evidence that the NEO-PI-R domains and facets bore any systematic relationship to psi scoring, an observation also made by Morris et al. (1995). The weak positive relationship between facet E4 (Activity) and psi scores is in line with the study of Van Kampen, et al. (1994) who found that this facet discriminated between hitters and missers. Van Kampen et al. found that Openness facet 03 (openness to feelings) was the best discriminator for hitting and missing, but that facet bore a near-zero correlation with psi scoring in our data. Openness facet 05 (openness to ideas), which was suggestively related to psi scoring in our data, is positively correlated with MBTI Intuition (Costa & McCrae, 1992), an MBTI trait that has been shown to correlate with scoring in a manual ganzfeld series at this laboratory (Broughton, Kanthamani, & Khilji, 1989).
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