Online card guessing task

Background details

This project examined associations between context, visual perception and belief in the paranormal, in a card guessing task.

This project asked you to complete two questionnaires which took 5 - 10 minutes. The questionnaires examined various personality traits, paranormal beliefs and experiences. We asked participants to watch a video of an individual flicking through a deck of cards, following which we asked a few simple questions about the video. This took 6 - 10 minutes.

We were interested to explore whether belief in the paranormal is reflected in the responses to, and perceptions of the videos.

Results

This project was run during the 2010 Summer holiday period and examined the concepts of transliminality and paranormal belief, in relation to a card guessing task.

Participants were divided into two groups and were asked to complete the transliminality and belief measures. Both groups watched a series of brief videos showing a gentleman flicking through (“riffling”) a deck of cards. One group were led to believe the gentleman was a psychic while the other group were led to believe he was a magician. We hypothesised that participants who believed they were watching a psychic would perform better (correctly identify the target card more often) than their counterparts in this task.

In each video, a target card was deliberately selected and displayed for an increasing length of time in an attempt to increase the likelihood that it was chosen. The exposure of the target cards was near the subliminal threshold and therefore sufficiently fast to appear superficially indifferent to that of the other cards. We hypothesised that more participants would correctly identify the target card when it was displayed for a longer period of time.

From the data, we found:

• A strong correlation between exposure time and correct identification of the target card; the longer the target was exposed for, the more likely it was to be correctly identified.

• A strong correlation between contextual information and correct identification of the target card; participants who believed the gentleman was a psychic were significantly more likely to correctly identify the target card than those who believed the gentleman was a magician. Participants in the psychic condition performed 30-50% better than their counterparts.

• No significant effect of transliminality was found upon the correct identification of the target card in this project.

• A weakly significant, negative correlation was found between age and transliminality.

These results provide a brief overview of the data. We may publish the full results as a formal academic paper in due course.

Thank you to everyone to has participated in the project. The preliminary results above were also circulated via our Participant Panel. If you wish to keep up-to-date about our research projects please subscribe for free to the Participant Panel.