The Precognitive Habituation Effect: an Adaptation Using Spider Stimuli

There has been a recent trend in precognition research to examine established conventional psychological paradigms for temporally reversed effects. The precognitive habituation (PH) effect is a newly emerging paradigm based upon a temporally reversed mere exposure (ME) study. Where in conventional psychology the ME effect involves exposing stimuli to participants and then measuring liking for it, the PH effect involves the opposite procedure. Participants are presented with a pair of photographs and are then asked to make a preference choice between the two. Previous research has argued that precognitive exposure to one target over another, results in diminished arousal and that negatively arousing targets are made less negative. The PH hypothesis is that negatively arousing targets will be preferred over the non-targets and that no effect (or a precognitive boredom effect) is expected on non-arousing (low-affect) trial. In this study, we sought to conceptually replicate and extend Bem’s (2003) findings by using less ethically problematic images. In the Bem studies, many of the images were disturbing (graphic images of gun shot victims etc) and Bem reported that some participants did make attempts to avoid looking at the stimuli through closing of the eyes or averting the gaze. To help circumvent the problem of showing potentially disturbing stimuli to participants, the authors sought to replace the negatively arousing images used by Bem with pictures of spiders. This was based on the work of Savva and French (2001; 2002), where spider pictures had been used to replace more disturbing images in a number of paradigms, including the presentiment effect. Fifty participants contributed to the current study and provided a self-report measure of spider fear, where 25 were categorised as ‘spider fearing’ and 25 as ‘no-spider fear’. The overall hit rates obtained by the different fear groups were not significant but the data did suggest that an analogous effect was to be found. A significant difference was found for the mean number of hits obtained on the spider stimuli versus the lowaffect pictures and only for the spider fearing group. This effect may be interpreted as a precognitive habituation or a temporally reversed mere-exposure effect. The results are discussed and future direction of research suggested.