[Phronk]

Originally Posted by Rudism

What exactly is the question being asked? This is from the abstract of the published paper:

The parrot "often" seems to respond. They want to test if this is true. Seems to me that any trials where the bird doesn't respond is directly relevant to the question being asked. The question has been redefined after the fact because the actual data didn't support the original hypothesis.

I took the question being asked as "when the parrot says one (or more) of this set of of words from his vocabulary, does it tend to match up with pictures representing that set of words?"

I do see your point; if this psychic signal was so strong and obvious, maybe the bird should drop everything else he's saying and say the word. But as I've been saying, I think it's a cleaner test of the effect to look for it in situations when it's likely to be strongest (i.e., when he's speaking intelligible words from his vocabulary). In essence, it enhances the signal to noise ratio. As I think I've shown, it wouldn't help detect a signal that wasn't there to begin with, but it can enhance one that is already there.

Also, I don't know if it was an after-the-fact thing, as you guess. It's always hard to tell with written reports that necessarily are written after the fact, but I think a clever researcher would specify this limited analysis to start with, before the study was even run. You also say it was done after the fact because the full data set didn't support the hypothesis. This is demonstrably false. Again: The full data set DID support the hypothesis.

There's no real equivalent to the "cloudy out" part of this analogy in the parrot example, but I will grant you that in this case it wouldn't make a difference. Also, the guy making guesses should be allowed to make more than one guess on trials when he feels like it (which, in this case, would always result in a hit, since there's only two possible guesses he can make). In this case, we would expect an overall hit rate of greater that 50%, since the "heads tails" guesses would skew it in that direction.

True, multiple guesses would make it closer to the actual study, but wouldn't be practical in my simple dichotomous-response example (since the baseline in any trials he guessed twice would be 100%, and thus useless). Still, the general principle is there.

The equivalent to the "when it is cloudy" part is "when the bird is talking intelligibly." The claim is that when the bird is talking, he's talking about the owner's thoughts.

It'd be interesting to test your assumptions too - that the bird should start talking when the owner is "thinking at him". But again, that's not what I interpreted the question to be.

You're claim is that the random permutation analysis would allow us to say whether or not the results are significant even with the "heads tails" guesses factored in. I'm not so sure about this, but I'm curious enough that I'm going to try to get a copy of the actual paper and delve into some math myself to see what they actually did.

Awesome. I'm going to keep this study in mind as I dig further into these types of analyses, too.

Another thing I haven't mentioned yet is that they threw some trials out from the random permutations, too: trials in which the same word was said more than once. Intuitively, this wouldn't seem to bias the results, and is pretty much necessary to get the proper baseline, but I haven't thought about it enough to say for sure.

I do hope one of us finds a rational explanation here. Because birds reading my mind = scary as hell.