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Key points
- The tip of the tongue state is likely driven by something other than access to partial qualities of the word.
- We may not identify characteristics of a word on the tip of the tongue as readily as once thought.
- The sense of knowing attributes of a word on the tip of the tongue may often be illusory.
A short while back, I was trying to think of a word that I wanted to use in a manuscript. The word escaped me but felt like it was right on the tip of my tongue, about to come to mind at any moment. I knew the general meaning of the word I was looking for because I knew what I wanted to say. I was writing about the idea of a cognitive process automatically getting launched following an initial trigger and was looking for the word. I tried using various descriptive phrases to try to arrive at the word on Google, to no avail. I wasn’t quite describing the word’s definition just right. As the word continued to evade my conscious access to it, I felt certain that it started with the letter “e.” I started looking up words starting with “e,” also to no avail.
You have probably experienced the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state at some point. Chances are, when you have had a TOT, you have similarly sometimes had a sense of the word’s qualities, like how long the word was, what it sounded like, or what its first letter was.
The idea that people can often think of a sought-after word’s qualities when it is on the tip of the tongue is so popular that I asked ChatGPT: “What is a tip of the tongue state?” Its response included a description of this type of partial access to the word’s attributes:
“A tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience is a phenomenon where a person knows that they know a particular word or piece of information but struggles to retrieve it from memory. It’s a feeling of being on the verge of remembering something but not quite being able to access it. During a TOT state, individuals often have a strong sense of familiarity with the word or information they’re trying to recall, and they may be able to provide partial information or describe the word’s characteristics, such as its starting letter or syllables.”
In fact, a longstanding theory of the TOT state is that it results from an ability to access partial attributes of the sought-after word in the first place. The idea is that we feel like the word is on the tip of our tongue because we can think of attributes of the sought-after word. According to this theory, the reason I felt like the word was right on the tip of my tongue was because the starting letter “e” was coming to mind.
New research suggests that this theory may be wrong.
Our study demonstrated a number of patterns that collectively call into question prevailing wisdom about the relationship between the TOT state and partial recollective access to attributes of the sought-after word. Here are some key highlights from this study:
- When people were in a TOT state, they actually tended to turn up a blank on possible partial attributes of the sought-after word more often than they conjured possible partial attributes.
- When people did conjure possible partial attributes of the target word (such as the first letter, the sound, or the number of syllables) they were wrong more often than they were right.
- People did, however, take a stab at guessing possible partial attributes (usually incorrectly) more often when a TOT state was present than when it was not. It was as if people were trying harder to identify possible partial attributes of the unidentified word when a TOT state was occurring.
- When the number of attempts at conjuring candidate partial attributes was equated, partial attribute accuracy tended to be comparable across TOT and non-TOT states. Rather than TOTs coinciding with privileged access to the target word’s attributes, people seemed to just guess more often during TOTs as they hunted for clues.
- Finally, during TOT states, people tended to feel like they knew a characteristic like the first letter even when they did not. In other words, people felt like they knew the first letter of the sought-after word during TOT states even though they could not correctly identify it. This hints at the possibility that much of our subjective experience of having access to partial attributes of the word on the tip of our tongue may be illusory.
Why then is partial attribute access such a pervasive theory and common human experience?
A clue may be found in the literature on a different quirky memory experience: déjà vu. Researchers have found that déjà vu experiences are associated with a phenomenon known as recollective confabulation. Basically, when déjà vu (or a déjà vu like experience) occurs, people often confabulate reasons for why the experience may be occurring. This can include conjuring candidate previous experiences that might explain the sensation, even if the generated candidates are wrong or confabulatory in nature.
Similarly, TOT states may drive people to search their memories for candidate clues and pieces of information that could help to explain the presence of the TOT state, and the extensive search for more candidate information might even help to pave the way for the eventual resolution of the TOT state.
To continue with the example of my own TOT state, after failing to find the word using Google, I started searching for the word by looking through research articles from the cognitive science literature that I thought might have the word in them. I combed through a number of different candidate research papers on attention before finally coming across it.
The word was obligatory.
References
Huebert, A. M., McNeely-White, K. L., & Cleary, A. M. (2023). On the relationship between tip-of-the-tongue states and partial recollective experience: Illusory partial recollective access during tip-of-the-tongue states. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 152(2), 542–570.
