Psychology› Social Psychology› Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs

Parapsychology — Retroactive facilitation of recall (Bem)

Submitted 2026-10-23

Field: Psychology › Social PsychologyType: Couldn't replicate a published resultArea: parapsychologyTarget: Retroactive facilitation of recall (Bem)Stage: replication

Hypothesis

Practising words after a memory test would improve recall of those words in the test, as one of Bem's precognition experiments reported.

What failed

Three pre-registered exact replications found no significant effect (combined n = 150, combined p = .83, one-tailed).

Broken assumption

Events after a test can influence performance on the test.

Why

The results do not support precognition.

From the published paper: Ritchie et al. PLoS ONE, 2012. ↗CC BY

Research ideas from this failure

Unvetted lead — read the papers

New hypotheses this failure suggests, each with a crucial experiment, a rival explanation of the original result, and the papers it rests on. Written by AI from paper titles and abstracts found on OpenAlex (and Europe PMC, for life and health sciences).

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Links in published research

Where this experiment's genes are known to matter outside its own research area, and the papers behind those links. Sources: Open Targets Platform and Europe PMC.