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.
Tlie eTourxieLl of
volume 35
MARCH 1971
number
REPETITION OF THE FRENCH
PRECOGNITION EXPERIMENTS WITH MICE
By Walter J. Levy, Jr., L. Allen Mayo, Jr.,
Eve Andr£, and Anita McRae2
ABSTRACT!
Six
series
of
exploratory
precognition
tests
with
mice
and
jirds
were carried out with the purpose of confirming the work of Duval and Montredon
in France.
The experiment tested the
ability of the animals to use
their psi to
avoid jumping into whichever
side
of
their cage would be
electrified on each
forthcoming five-second
trial.
Out of 1,154 random-behavior
trials, the animals
made a hit (avoided shock) 612 times (CR = 2.06; P < .05, two-tailed).
Since the apparatus monitored the animal’s position all the time
it was in the
cage
(in the French work there was
only
selective monitoring),
it was
possible
to reanalyze
the
data
for evidence
of
psi in
the animal behavior
patterns.
It
was found that the
animals
significantly avoided shocks when the
just-previous
trial
had
been
a
nonshock
trial
(P
,015).
If
the
just-previous
trials
were
shock
trials, however, the number of hits was not significant.
Another test effect
was
that
trials
following a period
of low
activity (fewer than three jumps back
and forth during the
intertrial period) were also significant (P = .015);
trials
fol-
lowing three or more jumps were
not.
When both
successful
conditions
(non-
shock and low
activity) were
combined,
they
gave
an
even more
significant
separation (P = .006).
Mr. Levy
is a second-year medical student at the Medical College of Georgia;
Mr. Mayo
is a graduate student in zoology at Duke University; Miss Andr6
is
employed as a librarian in Victoria, Australia; and Miss McRae is a research assis-
tant at the Institute for Parapsychology.—Ed.
I. The Preliminary Series
In 1968, two French biologists, Duval and Montredon,3 published a
report on experiments which gave evidence that mice were able to
.
1 This work was supported by the Institute for Parapsychology of the Founda-
tion for Research on the Nature of Man.
* The authors wish to express their thanks to Drs. J. B. Rhine and R. L. Morris
for valuable advice and encouragement and to Mrs. Dorothy H. Pope for much of
the work
of compiling
the
paper.
Miss
Carol
Schaber,
Dr.
Robert
Brier,
Dr.
i
Helmut Schmidt, and Miss Barbara Benton made important contributions at several
I
points.
|
* These are assumed names.
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The Journal of Parapsychology
use precognition to avoid shock as they jumped back and forth in
the two sections of a mildly electrified cage (1).
This work was outstanding in a number of ways.
It won the
McDougall Award as an important scientific contribution;
it came
from a respected biological laboratory; and
it was based on work
with a species not hitherto tested by researchers, who had already
worked with cats, dogs, and pigeons. The French work was also the
first precognition test with any kind of animal and—what
is more
important perhaps—it was the
first completely automated
test.
At
least,
it went further than any previous work toward eliminating
psi on the part of the experimenter which, as Rhine and Feather had
pointed out
(3), stood in the way of a conclusive interpretation of
the earlier evidence for psi in animals.
From the point of view of methodology in psi research, however,
the most effective advance in the French research was
its reliance
on the technique for selecting “random-behavior” trials, an idea first
introduced by Osis and Foster
(2)
but not applied as a primary
experimental device hitherto. This is a technique for sifting out those
trials in which
it is obvious that ESP probably could not have been
operating.
Osis and Foster had observed that when side habits dom-
inated the behavior of the cats being tested, the ESP scores were
lower than on the other
trials.
Duval and Montredon applied the
same principle to the mouse work; by eliminating those
trials
in
which the animal was obviously responding to non-psi factors—such
as shock—they obtained more
significant
results than when these
trials were included
in the
total.
This procedure was reliable and
efficient, and it was an important step forward for parapsychology.
Over and above these specific points of importance in the French
work was the experimenters’ own expressed hope that they had made
some progress toward discovering the “guinea pig” that
is needed
for the greater effectiveness of the research program in parapsychol-
ogy.
Their anticipation played a large part in motivating the authors
of the present work to attempt a replication.
The automation in the
French tests seemed to have eliminated the experimenter as a source
of psi and to have centered on the animal as the producer of the re-
sults ; and it appeared reasonable that replication with other rodents
could be expected to follow.
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.
Repetition of French Experiments with Mice
The individual differences of the French mice were not a con-
spicuous factor in the results.
Since different strains had been used,
it seemed
likely that there would be no great experimental
risk in
using various strains of American mice in the attempted replication.
Similarly,
there were modifications
in the construction
of the ap-
paratus, which was built with the aid of information provided by the
French authors.
The first experiment was begun and largely completed during the
summer of 1969 at the Institute for Parapsychology, although a com-
plete analysis of the results had to be
left for a later time, since the
two senior authors had enrolled in graduate school.
The general procedure of
this experiment was
to put
the
test
animal into a box which was divided by a low partition into two
equal parts.
The floor grid of the box was wired
electrically and
there was an electronic selector which randomly chose one side or
the other as the side of the box which would receive an electric charge
for each
trial. The animal was free to jump from side to side.
If
it
chose the “wrong” one,
it received a shock
;
if
it chose the “right”
one,
it did not.
An important aspect of the experiment, as in the French work,
was the elimination of those
trials
in which
psi probably was not
operating.
This
nonrandom”
behavior was
of two kinds
:
static
and mechanical. A
“static”
trial
occurred when the animal, even
though shocked, continued to stay in the same side of the box, possibly
because
it did not feel the shock, or because
it was too tired or too
frightened to jump, or for some similar reason.
If the animal was
shocked and immediately jumped
in
response,
this was
to be ex-
pected;
it was therefore
called “mechanical”
behavior.
The
“ran-
dom
’
trials, on which the evaluations were based, were the ones in
which the animal jumped for no apparent reason.
Any change of
side after the five-second shock period qualified the following
trial
as random.
The selection of random-behavior trials in the present experiment
differed from that in the French work
in the following way:
the
French monitored the animal’s position only at the start of each five-
second
trial.
If the animal jumped once after the trial, their equip-
ment recorded a change of sides
; but if it jumped twice (or any even
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