MANAGING THE TARGET-POOL BANDWIDTH - POSSIBLE NOISE-REDUCTION FOR ANOMALOUS COGNITION EXPERIMENTS

Lantz and colleagues recently reported in the first of two studies tha t experienced receivers from the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory produce d significant evidence for anomalous cognition (AC) of static targets but showed little evidence for AC of dynamic targets. This result was surprising: It was directly opposite to the results that were derived from the 1994 Bem and Honorton ganzfeld database. In Lantz et al.'s ex periment, the topics of the dynamic targets were virtually unlimited, whereas the topics for the static targets were constrained in content, size of cognitive elements, and range of affect. In a second experime nt, they redesigned the target pools to correct this imbalance and obs erved significant improvement of AC functioning. We incorporate these findings into a definition of target-pool bandwidth and propose that t he proper selection of bandwidth will lead to a reduction of incorrect information in free-response AC.