IS MEMORY FOR HEAD ORIENTATION BASED ON A LEFT-LOOKING SCHEMA

Research has shown that people misremember right-looking heads on coin s as facing to the left, suggesting a general memory schema that favor s left-lookers. This hypothesis was investigated in a study of 241 sub jects in three experiments who were shown photographs of faces looking to the left, to the right, or at the observer and were later asked to identify whether each one had subsequently been left-right reversed. Also, in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively, initial judgments of likin g and of orientation were obtained. Unexpectedly, orientation memory a ccuracy was lower after a 5-s exposure than after a 1-s exposure, and after initial judgments of lateral orientation than after judgments of liking. Although the difference between left- and right-lookers was s ignificant in only 2 of 14 comparisons, aggregated data showed that id entification accuracy was generally higher for left-lookers, with a me an effect size of 0.16. Although small, this difference is consistent with the hypothesis of a left-looking schema for heads.