Oh Zener cards and such. Yes; but that is specifically not remote viewing. RV by definition is a 'free response' psi trial; Zener cards constitute a 'forced choice' trial. In addition to boring the lab subjects to death (a serious issue when personal interest seems to affect the psychology, and anything that affects the psychology generally affects the psychic and often their performance), forced-choice situations invoke a great deal more analytical interference for psychics, that's one reason much of the research in psi moved away from that.
Even quite some years ago, May, Spottiswoode and James wrote:
...the mean of the forced-choice effect size is 2.5 times smaller than that of the Ganzfeld ... there is clearly a meaningful difference. (FYI Ganzfeld is a type of free-response remote viewing designed to minimize external stimuli and sensory input for the viewer.)
http://www.jsasoc.com/docs/Target-bandwidth.pdf
They discuss that in forced-choice scenarios, a psychic's memory of what has come before may interfere. Memory/visualization might be 'stronger' in the mind of the psychic than the often subtle, abstract 'impressions' from psi.
(This is related to the analytical problems I mentioned. In practicing RV, the instant my minds gets an idea of 'what it might be', I'm doomed if I can't let go of that, as the mind will begin literally filtering incoming info to match that suspicion, and imagination will start 'helping'. Frontloading in RV--that is, telling the viewer 'something' about the target (how much or what varies)--is deadly for viewers who aren't relatively developed in the skill. There is so much interference from analysis and imagination already to deal with, that 'strengthening' either or both of those factors can have a really negative impact on the session result.)
The rest of the paper discusses experiments that varied the target pool contents, and how basically, a 'moderate' target pool bandwidth was found to produce the best results. This means, not a small selection which is forced choice, and not an infinite selection (galaxies vs. DNA vs. 'events' as targets) for example, but a more moderate framework, such as, targets which are on this planet, and which could be normally perceived by the viewer should they encounter them, and which are relatively fixed (meaning, locations, vs. events). There is still a pretty mind boggling range of targets--basically, anything you could go out and take a picture of that wasn't a human 'event'. But there seemed to be less analysis the farther you got from forced-choice, and less imagination the farther you got from infinite-choice.
I might add that in the 'review' we're discussing maybe doing, those choosing the targets, within the parameters that'd be posted, would have infinite choice. Unlike science we wouldn't be trying to prove remote viewing was legit here; we'd just be demonstrating whatever it is for whatever group of laymen who happen to participate. I've seen viewers do quite well on micro targets (including targets inside the human body, for medical diagnostics).
PJ
