The Pittfall called Expectations

During RV-training I noticed, I started as a blank sheet! That worked realy well!
Getting useful information about a target was easy! It just happend! But after tree weeks of dayly practice...the hit-rates dropped dramatically! Why? What happend?

After reviewing all my previous sessions, I discovered that after a while I was working with my memory instead of intuïtion. Somehow I was expecting to see something similar to what I had seen before. My mind was combining information from all previous targets. It seemed like my mind was creating it's own expectations. Whitout me even taking notice of that! I still believed I was RV-ing! And simply was loosing my touch. So a continues stream of RV-sessions somehow creates expectations. Similar to the Pavlov-effect! For instance if the previous feed-back was mostly buildings...the mind sets allmost automatically to RV-ing buildings! But that's not RV-ing...it's a memory interference!

Earlier this week I had an interesting conversation with a RV-critic. He stated that the website I was using for practice, might link (parts of) my rv-data to an image and could combine it with the feedback image in the database. Making it look like I was RV-ing. Although I think that is really far-fetched...it can not be completely excluded that he could be right!

I really do not know what script they are using, so to check if I would be able to RV without the computer, my husband and I set up an experiment. He has got plenty of photographs that I have never seen. He went to another room...blindly took a photograph out of a box and put it in a double envelope. So he did not know what the target picture was and neither did I.
I RV-ed this target correctly! We did a total session of six targets that way, and I provided amazing details about the target-pictures.

With the last target, my husband wanted to pull a trick on me. This time he peaked and selected a photograph with nothing but a green blur on it, just to see what the result would be if there was nothing in the picture. Ofcourse he didn't tell me that!

I RV-ed a shape of a tree...green...but not really green like a tree. More like grey-green or army-green. Then I pointed at his back-pack, and said that color! The picture is a blur with that color grey-green. So he took the photograph out of the envelope and held it next to the back-pack! And it was exactly that color! Even the shape I drew, was faintly in the pictures blur.

It pretty much conviced me, that there is nothing wrong with the computerized RV-training sessions on the website! But I was amazed by the target hit-rates in this session! Being used to the computer...it was new for me, to RV that way, and so I was like a blank sheet again! With amazing results!

If it wasn't for the critic...I would not have dicovered this so soon!

And I have to be aware of any expectations I might have about a target, and avoid the Pavlov-effect. These test were very usefull!