Abstract
Two experiments were conducted to assess people’s ability to remember the orientation of the monarch’s profile on contemporary British coins. Experiment 1 confirmed that, when particular coins are drawn from memory, the likelihood of the Queen’s head being drawn incorrectly as facing to the left was greater than chance. However, an identical bias appeared when other British subjects were simply asked to draw a female human profile. In Experiment 2, British subjects were asked to describe the orientation of the Queen’s head on both coins and postage stamps. Most people were accurate in describing a 20-pence stamp but inaccurate in describing a 20-pence coin. The detailed findings indicated that many British people have a general schema for objects bearing the head of the monarch that is based primarily on their experience with postage stamps, but which is activated when they are asked to retrieve information about coins.
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Part of this paper was presented at the Fourth Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Como, Italy, September 1990. The author is grateful for the comments and suggestions of Vicki Bruce, Gregory Jones, Peter Morris, and Benny Shanon.
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Richardson, J.T.E. Remembering the appearance of familiar objects: A study of monarchic memory. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 30, 389–392 (1992). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334097
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03334097