Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A variety of phenomena related to the oblique regions of space have been observed across modality and across domain. For instance, the classic ‘oblique effect’ describes a deficit in visual acuity for oriented lines in the oblique regions of space, and classic ‘prototype effects’ describe a bias to mis-localize objects towards the oblique regions of space. While there has been speculation that some ‘oblique-related effects’ share a common mechanism, many of these effects are explained in very different terms. The visual oblique effect itself is often understood as arising from coding asymmetries in orientation-selective neurons in the brain, whereas motor oblique effects have been described as arising from gravitational cues and/or physical limitations of the arm. Are these really distinct effects? Here, we show that individuals show stable oblique biases across these two modalities, suggesting that these effects may have a common cause.