Memory for the final position of a moving object is displaced forward along its direction of travel.
Freyd and Finke found in 1984 that observers misremember a stopped object as having travelled slightly further than it did. The distortion is in the direction of implied motion and scales with implied speed. It suggests perception is predictive rather than a record, extrapolating a moment ahead so that action can meet the world where it is going to be.
In practice
- A witness places the vehicle further along the road than the footage shows, and is not lying.
- A reviewer describes a trend as having reached a point it had not yet reached.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind