ABSTRACT
A few years ago, we observed that many people appear to be subject to a striking mnemonic illusion (Jones & Martin, 1992; Martin & Jones, 1992). They tend systematically to misremember certain spatial orientations. For example, the head depicted on British coins always faces to the viewer’s right but, notwithstanding a lifetime’s experience of this, the majority of people who were sampled in Britain were found to remember the head as facing to the left (Jones & Martin, 1992). Subsequent research has shown that this illusion is representative of a quite widespread class of distortions in memory for orientation – a set of linked illusions rather than a single illusion – and has begun to shed light on the underlying processes that are responsible.
EXPERIMENT
