Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Noble  Wiseman's criteria actually tested to see whether the dog has any predictive abilities. Sheldrake's don't. |
By accident?
How did Wiseman do that meaningfully? The claim isn't a fortune telling dog, it is a claim the dog knows when the
owner is coming home, not a neighbour coming home, not the black cat at 21 walking by but some sort of emotional bond with owner(s)...
.i.e. more suggestive of conscious/subconscious telepathy
If the dog is anticipating sometimes, due to the owner (unavoidably) thinking about coming home at times ... Sheldrake's criteria is the best way to find any real effect beyond noise, false triggers, etc.
Quote:
If the owner returns 100 minutes after the start of the trial and the dog starts "signalling" 10 minutes after the start of the trial and stays there until the owner comes home then the proportion of time spent in the "waiting position" will be 90% and 100% for the main period and the return period respectively. If this was repeated enough times it would attain statistical significance.
This is an extreme example but it demonstrates that Sheldrake's criteria are not a valid measure.
|
Sheldrake says ',The going-to-the-window-more-and-more hypothesis can be tested by looking in more detail at the average timecourses of long, medium and short experiments in Fig. 4. This Figure shows data from all the experiments, and also from the "normal" experiments after the exclusion of the minority of "noisy" experiments, which tended to obscure the usual pattern.
The data in Fig. 4 show that Jaytee's waiting at the window occurred soonest in the short experiments, later in the medium experiments and latest in the long experiments. In other words, Jaytee's behavior was more closely related to PS's impending return than to the amount of time that had elapsed since she went out. If Jaytee had simply gone to the window more and more as time went on, there should have been little or no difference between the time he spent there in the long, medium and short experiments in any given period. This can be tested statistically. (In the following analyses........ '