Testing Object Perception in the Laboratory

Clairvoyance was built directly into Rhine's Duke card-guessing program: in the "pure clairvoyance" condition, a subject guessed the order of a sealed, unseen deck of Zener cards with no sender looking at them at all, ruling out telepathy as an explanation for any hit. Rhine's early results again beat chance, and again drew the same objections levelled at his telepathy work: inadequate card shielding, non-random shuffling, and selective reporting of successful runs. Joseph Gaither Pratt, Rhine's assistant, ran a much-cited clairvoyance series with student Hubert Pearce across separate campus buildings, later criticised for the recording procedures used to log Pearce's calls against the target order.

No twentieth-century clairvoyance protocol produced an effect that later independent laboratories could reliably reproduce under matching conditions. The claim was largely absorbed into remote viewing research from the 1970s onward, which asked subjects to describe a real, distant, physically existing target rather than a hidden card, and into the ganzfeld line, which nominally tests telepathy but has sometimes used non-agent "clairvoyance" target selection as a control condition. Clairvoyance therefore no longer has a dedicated modern research programme of its own; its evidentiary status rests on the same unreplicated card-guessing record that undermined the parallel telepathy claim.