Overview

Mossbridge’s research program examines precognition, the ability to access accurate information about seemingly unpredictable future events without ordinary sensory cues or inference, with particular emphasis on conscious forms such as precognitive remote viewing. Her work distinguishes between different temporal and phenomenological types of precognition and investigates both the empirical evidence and potential mechanisms underlying these phenomena.

Mossbridge has characterized precognition as broadly distributed across human populations, with rigorous controlled experiments demonstrating small but significant effects in unselected participant samples.⁴ Rather than focusing exclusively on exceptional individuals, her research strategy has involved large-scale online experiments designed to identify patterns in how precognitive accuracy relates to demographic, emotional, and environmental variables.

Precognitive Remote Viewing Experiments

Mossbridge conducted two major online experiments investigating precognitive remote viewing in unselected populations. The first employed a forced-choice, self-judged task in which 682 unpaid participants contributed 5,432 trials total. The second used a free-response, independently judged design with 307 paid participants, each contributing a single trial.¹

Results differed between task formats. The forced-choice experiment yielded no significant target precognition overall, though complex effects emerged related to participant sex-at-birth. The free-response experiment, by contrast, demonstrated significant target precognition, a key distinction suggesting that task characteristics substantially mitigate overall performance.¹ This finding aligns with historical precedent: the most convincing replications of precognitive dreaming came from two case studies using a single skilled precognitive dreamer in the Maimonides studies, rather than from group experiments with unselected populations.⁴

In a more recent case study, Mossbridge and colleagues worked with an individual possessing the unusual ability to enter lucid dream states almost at will and sketch images upon awakening. The researchers pre-registered a formal experiment with two sets of five trials, implementing rigorous controls: the dreamer recorded dream transcripts, a skeptical target-selector used a random number generator to select targets, and an analyst stored all materials in a database before judging occurred. Three judging methods were employed, two skilled human judges (producing 3 hits out of 10), unskilled human judges (1 hit out of 10), and an exploratory artificial intelligence scoring method.⁴

Temporal and Environmental Factors

A distinctive contribution of Mossbridge’s research involves systematic analysis of environmental and temporal variables affecting precognitive performance. In a post-hoc analysis of online precognition data, she examined whether lunar phases correlated with both trial initiation and accuracy rates.

The analysis revealed striking patterns: participants were significantly more likely to initiate trials during last quarter and waning crescent phases, and significantly less likely during full and waning gibbous phases. This pattern held across two large data batches (batch 1: n = 1,452; batch 2: n = 2,659) with p-values reaching 1×10⁻⁶.² Moreover, during moon phases when participants were more likely to initiate trials, they also performed better on the precognitive task itself. Batch 1 showed a hit-to-miss ratio of .83 during last quarter/waning crescent phases versus .58 during full/waning gibbous phases (χ² = 5.79, p < .017). Batch 2 replicated this pattern with ratios of .90 versus .68 (χ² = 6.65, p < .01).²

Mossbridge interpreted these findings as suggesting potential gravitational or geomagnetic influences on psi phenomena, noting that while it is unsurprising participants would avoid tasks during periods of poor performance, the consistent correlation with lunar phases was unexpected and warrants investigation by other researchers studying precognition and psi more broadly.²

Theoretical Models and Mechanisms

Mossbridge has developed a comprehensive theoretical framework distinguishing between two fundamentally different forms of precognition, each with distinct characteristics and requiring different explanatory mechanisms.

The first form (presentiment or physiological precognition) involves mostly unconscious physiological responses to future stimuli with short lead times (typically seconds). This includes predictive anticipatory activity (PAA), in which the body responds to an upcoming stimulus before conscious awareness of that stimulus occurs. The second form (precognitive remote viewing) involves mostly conscious perception and cognition directed toward future events with longer lead times (minutes to hours or more).³

To account for presentiment, Mossbridge proposed a physical-time-symmetry (PTS) model, which posits that electromagnetic or quantum-level symmetries in time might allow physiological systems to respond to future events through mechanisms analogous to those governing ordinary perception. However, she argued that precognitive remote viewing, involving conscious, intentional access to information about distant future events, may require a different mechanism entirely: a pervasive-universal-consciousness (PUC) model in which consciousness itself possesses non-local properties enabling access to future information.³

Critically, Mossbridge emphasized that both models contain testable, falsifiable elements. The PTS model predicts specific physiological signatures and temporal constraints; the PUC model predicts that conscious precognition should be less constrained by time and distance than presentiment. These predictions can be empirically evaluated, allowing the models to be refined or rejected based on evidence.³

Emotional State and Performance

A consistent finding across Mossbridge’s precognitive remote viewing experiments concerns the relationship between emotional state and accuracy. In the free-response PRV task, both unconditional love and anxiety showed significant positive correlations with higher accuracy.¹ This finding suggests that emotional engagement (whether characterized by positive affect (love) or heightened arousal (anxiety)) facilitates precognitive performance.

Additionally, target interestingness emerged as a robust predictor of accuracy in both forced-choice and free-response tasks. Targets most likely to be correctly predicted were also more likely to be judged as interesting compared to targets most likely to be incorrectly predicted, with this effect confirmed in pre-registered analyses.¹ This pattern suggests that the salience or personal relevance of future information influences the likelihood of successful precognitive access.

These findings align with theoretical perspectives emphasizing emotion’s role in precognition. Mossbridge noted that precognitive experiences often surface in contexts of stress and trauma, yet ultimately orient individuals toward life and heightened awareness of being alive, a life-directed function that may explain why emotional engagement facilitates precognitive accuracy.⁵