Investigating methodological issues in EDA-DMILS: Results from a pilot study

This article addresses methodological issues in current EDA-DMILS research. The authors conducted an exploratory DMILS pilot study with 26 sessions an d found a medium size effect, No significant psi finding is claimed, as the experiment was not designed to find or investigate any; instead, the autho rs studied the variation of this effect as a function of different methodol ogical approaches. They compared different EDA parameters (tonic or phasic) and found effects similar in size. Furthermore, they contrasted the tradit ional parapsychological way to parameterize data with methods adapted from psychophysiological research, These new parameters clearly outperformed the parameter used so far in DMILS/Remote Staring research. Respiration is cor related with the electrodermal system. The authors investigated whether EDA . responses that are caused by sudden irregular patterns in breathing are a lso part of the remote intention effect. Therefore, they discarded all thes e responses from the data. The effect size dropped down to 30%-77% (dependi ng on the parameter) of its original value. This indicates that the remote intention effect is very likely to also affect the pulmonary system. Finall y, they compared different statistical methods for the evaluation of EDA-DM ILS data and show the traditional percentage influence score method is neit her appropriate nor suitable. The authors present alternative methods, and compare their power using the pilot study data.