Term used in psychical research and parapsychology to indicate
a form of extrasensory perception in which the subject
obtains knowledge of some event in the past by paranormal
cognition. This amounts to a kind of backward precognition.
F. W. H. Myers combined retrocognition with his theory of
psychorrhagic diathesis to explain the phenomena of
haunting. It was also suggested that apparitions of the dead
and visions of the future, owing to a curious inversion of time,
may be amenable to retrocognition.