This note's purpose is to outline a model of the oblique effect. It was inspired by findings about a memorial manifestation of the oblique phenomenon that appeared in a study of memory for the orientation of a 3.8-cpd sinusoidal grating at two reference orientations, 90 and 45 deg (Thoms, 1981). The results of the study suggested an exponential decay process that could be related, in some rather surprising ways, to current thinking about the corresponding sensory oblique effect.In Thoms's study, measurements were made with a delayed comparison procedure as follows: On each trial, the grating was flashed twice for 200 msec with an interstimulus interval ranging from .35 to 2.8 sec.Observers were required to report whether the grating's orientation was the same or different on the two presentations. For each of the four subjects studied, and for both the vertical and the oblique gratings, discriminability decreased with increase in interstimulus interval. But the results for the 9O-deg reference orientation and the 45-deg orientation differed in two important ways: First, orientation discrimination was poorer at 45 deg than at 90 deg for all interstimulus intervals. Second, the rate of decay of discriminability was slower at 45 deg than at 90 deg, The latter finding, which is in line with the results of another recent study showing longer visible persistence at oblique meridians relative to persistence at the main meridians (Bowling & Lovegrove, 1981), provided the hint that led to our theoretical conceptions.The neural model of the oblique effect appears in the first section of this paper after the presentation of a brief outline of background information needed to develop our arguments. The second section relates the model from the first section to ideas about holographic information storage with suggestions about a physiological realization of a hologram. Neural Modelingof the Oblique EffectThe oblique effect, which we define as sensory, perceptual, or cognitive performance that depends on stimulus orientation, was first formally examined