[Chris Noble]

Originally Posted by Open Mind

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

The original claim from the dog's owner was that her parents could tell when she was returning from the behaviour of the dog. This is what Wiseman tested.

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.

Now you've relaxed the criteria to make it meaningless. If the dog starts "signalling" an hour before the owner comes home then that can be rationalised in a post hoc manner as the owner thinking about coming home. If the dog doesn't start "signalling" until 30 minutes after the owner starts to come home that's OK too.

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........ '

These trials had non-randomised return times. The dog only needs to have a rough estimate of the period of absence -long, medium or short - to be able to produce a statistically significant "effect".