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Published on: June 14, 2019
On the relationship between tip-of-the-tongue states and partial recollective experience: Illusory partial
Andrew M Huebert1, Katherine L McNeely-White1, Anne M Cleary1
1Department of Psychology.
Abstract:
Most people have experienced the sensation of having a word on the tip of the tongue. A common assumption is that a major driving force underlying the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state is conscious partial recollective access to some of the unretrieved word's attributes, such as its first letter. In the present study, under free-report conditions, participants provided more partial recollection responses during TOTs than non-TOTs without being more accurate among their provided responses. Under forced-guessing conditions in which participants needed to guess at the unidentified target word's first letter, participants exhibited false partial recollective experience during TOTs. This was shown by a strong tendency during TOTs to indicate that they knew the first letter, when in actuality, they were wrong in their first-letter guess. An additional experiment showed illusory partial recollection of a contextual detail during TOTs relative to non-TOTs. The full pattern of results portrays an alternative possible theoretical relationship between TOT states and subjective partial recollective experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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