A Claim with No Experimental Tradition

Unlike precognition, which Rhine built directly into the Duke card-guessing protocol by having subjects call a deck before it was shuffled, retrocognition was never given an equivalent controlled test. The practical difficulty is structural: a precognition trial can specify in advance exactly what future fact a subject must guess and then check it objectively, but a retrocognition claim is almost always identified only after the fact, when a witness's impression is compared against a historical record the witness may have had partial, forgotten access to already.

Psychical researchers who have discussed retrocognition, including analysts of the Moberly-Jourdain case, generally treat it as a hypothesis mirroring precognition rather than as a faculty with its own dedicated study, and no laboratory programme comparable to the ganzfeld or Rhine card series has ever been built around it. What little the parapsychological literature says about retrocognition therefore rests almost entirely on case analysis of testimony like An Adventure, not on controlled experiment, and mainstream historians and psychologists explain the best-known cases through cryptomnesia, the resurfacing of previously absorbed but forgotten information, and ordinary narrative reconstruction after the fact.