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Imagine that you witness a crime, and are later pressed to remember everything that you can about the event. You remember that the vehicle involved was a blue truck and that it had something written on the side. You cannot remember what was written on the side, and although the word eludes you, you feel as if the word is right there on the verge of access and it might come to you at any moment. You are having what is called a “tip-of-the-tongue” experience for the word; It feels as if it is right there on the tip of your tongue, about to be accessed, but hasn’t quite made its way to your full awareness yet.
We have all had this experience at one time or another. Such tip-of-the-tongue experiences can be frustrating—the word seems like it is in our memory but is somehow just beyond our reach. And, unfortunately, the experience becomes more frequent as we age.
But imagine that you are pressed to remember anything about the word that you can possibly conjure up from memory. Was it light or dark? What did the font look like? Was the word big or small? Can you think of the word’s first letter? Was it a long or a short word? Was it common or rare? Can you think of anything at all?
An abundance of research over the years has suggested that when in a tip-of-the-tongue state for a word, people often have access to some of the word’s attributes (like the first letter of the word or what it sounds like). So it is possible that in the above scenario, you would be able to think of some things about the word even though you could not retrieve the word itself.
Of course, you could also end up wrong in the bits and pieces that you think up (perhaps even hilariously wrong, as described in this blog post about witnessing a hit-and-run and then trying to remember what was written on the side of the bus involved).
For example, have you ever felt certain during a tip-of-the-tongue state that you knew the first letter of the word, only to find out later that you were wrong? What leads to this feeling of knowing something about the unretrieved information, but being wrong about it?
In our lab, we recently asked if the very feeling of being in a tip-of-the-tongue state can cause people to erroneously make certain judgments about the characteristics of an inaccessible word. We wanted to know: Can a tip-of-the-tongue feeling bias people toward thinking that an unretrieved word has certain qualities or characteristics, even when it does not?
We found evidence that it can. In our study (recently published ahead of print in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition), we found that the tip-of-the-tongue feeling biased people toward thinking that the unretrieved word had attributes that would be characteristic of more easily accessible words. These judged attributes included font characteristics: When experiencing a tip-of-the-tongue state for a word that they could not retrieve from memory, people were biased to think that the word was recently seen in a darker, clearer font, even when it was not; they were also biased to think that it was recently seen in a larger font, even when it was not. Tip-of-the-tongue states also biased people toward thinking that the unretrieved word was a higher frequency word in the language, even when that wasn't the case.
These biases that we discovered are such that the feeling of being in a tip-of-the-tongue state leads people to infer that the unretrieved information has qualities that tend to characterize items that are easier to access from memory. High frequency words are easier to think of than low frequency words and thus are more accessible, and we found that being in a tip-of-the-tongue state biased people toward thinking that the unretrieved word was likely to be higher in frequency. Likewise, words that are easier to see are also easier to access because it is easier to process them during reading, and we found that being in a tip-of-the-tongue state biased people toward thinking that the unretrieved word was last seen in either a darker, clearer font or a larger font.
As far as why tip-of-the-tongue states lead to these biases, it may be because the feeling of being on the verge of accessing a word by itself implies that the unretrieved word is in a heightened state of accessibility relative to an unretrieved word that does not feel on the verge of access. This may lead people to infer from the feeling of being in a tip-of-the-tongue state that the unretrieved word has attributes that are characteristic of highly accessible items, such as high font clarity, high word frequency, or other qualities consistent with greater accessibility.
Overall, these findings suggest that the tip-of-the-tongue feeling is a biasing factor in people’s decision-making during retrieval failure. Basically, when you fail to find the information in memory that you are looking for, having a feeling that it is on the tip of your tongue is something that you have to go on in making a decision, and it may be better than having nothing to go on. The downside of this is that you may infer things about the unretrieved information that are incorrect because the tip-of-the-tongue feeling can bias you toward inferring certain qualities or characteristics of the unretrieved information that are not necessarily accurate. So, the next time you have a feeling that something is on the tip of your tongue but not quite within your reach yet, be wary of making judgments about the information!
