Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Human Cognition and Affect

Six experiments are described that take well‐established psychological effects on human cognition and affect and “time‐reverse” them so that the individual's responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Two of the experiments tested for the retroactive facilitation of recall: It is well known that rehearsing or practicing a set of verbal materials enhances an individual's ability to recall them on a subsequent test. In our experiments, participants were first shown 48 common words one at a time and were then asked to recall as many of those words as they could. They were then given practice exercises on a randomly selected subset of those words. The results show that participants recalled more of the words they later practiced than the control words they did not practice. Two experiments on retroactive priming provide evidence for retroactive influence on an individual's response times when judging the pleasantness or unpleasantness of visual stimuli. Finally, two experiments...