Presentiment results challenged?

[Indian]

I saw a recent thread on the JREF forum where a poster uses a computer simulation to simulate presentiment experiments - and he claims to have explained Radin's results as an artefact - no presentiment needed.
I don't know statistics or programming enough to completely evaluate this claim - but I'm sure some readers here can.
At first I thought this "Robin" hadn't read the paper from Radin he linked to - but further down in the thread Radin's explanations for why anticipation effects can't explain his results is challenged more in detail.

I've seen a comment by Radin on his blog, where he said women preform better generally, and some women better than others. I would suggest a screening to find a few "star preformers" to get better results & thus if possiple, refute this "anticipation effect" counter explanation.

[David Bailey]

I have actually tried simulating this some time ago. My understanding of this is as follows (but it is only my understanding):

Emotional images are presented at random, so that on the face of it, no anticipation strategy can produce an effect - and indeed it can't help a person guess when the next emotional picture will turn up. However, if you simulate an anticipation strategy - say the person gets more aroused after a string of calm pictures because he thinks the next image is more likely to be an emotional one (the gambler's fallacy), then this can have an effect on the overall results, because the images are presented at random - so the total number of emotional images per run of say 40 pictures will vary.

My way of understanding this rather counter-intuitive effect, is to imagining splitting the set of experiments into two sets - those that have (by chance) more emotional images(EI), and those that have less. Taking the set with fewer EI, the mean gap between successive EI will be slightly greater than in the other group. This means that the emotional response will be slightly different in the two groups. When you put the two groups together, this almost averages out, but there are slightly fewer EI in the first group, so the average is very slightly skewed as a result of the anticipation strategy.

Dean's answer to this is that he analysed his results to see if his subjects were exhibiting an anticipation strategy sufficient to explain the results, and they were not. Remember, the effects of an anticipation strategy should show up in the calm images following an EI - so he would see the effect.

Read Dean's paper for full details.

David