Mind/Machine Interaction Consortium: PortREG Replication Experiments

A consortium of research groups at Freiburg, Giessen, and Princeton was formed in 1996 to pursue multidisciplinary studies of mind/machine interaction anomalies. The first collaborative project undertaken was an attempted replication of prior Princeton experiments that had demonstrated anomalous deviations of the outputs of electronic random event generators in correlation with prestated intentions of human operators. For this replication, each of the three participating laboratories collected data from 250 3000–trial 200 binary-sample experimental sessions, generated by 227 human operators. Identical noise-source equipment was used throughout, and essentially similar protocols and data analysis procedures were followed. Data were binned in terms of operator intention to increase the mean of the 200-binary-sample distributions (HI); to decrease the mean (LO); or not to attempt any influence (BL). Contiguous unattended calibrations were carried forward throughout. The agreed upon primary criterion for the anomalous effect was the magnitude of the HI–LO data separation, but data also were collected on a number of secondary correlates. The primary result of this replication effort was that whereas the overall HI–LO mean separations proceeded in the intended direction at all three laboratories, the overall sizes of these deviations failed by an order of magnitude to attain that of the prior experiments, or to achieve any persuasive level of statistical significance. However, various portions of the data displayed a substantial number of interior structural anomalies in such features as a reduction in trial-level standard deviations; irregular series-position patterns; and differential dependencies on various secondary parameters, such as feedback type or experimental run length, to a composite extent well beyond chance expectation. The change from the systematic, intention-correlated mean shifts found in the prior studies, to this polyglot pattern of structural distortions, testifies to inadequate understanding of the basic phenomena involved and suggests a need for more sophisticated experiments and theoretical models for their further elucidation.