Name that tune: eliciting the tip-of-the-tongue experience using auditory stimuli

An experiment was conducted to assess whether auditory stimuli could elicit the tip-of-the-tongue state. Subjects were presented segments of 50 television theme songs and asked to indicate the title of the corresponding show. Twenty-one percent of all retrieval attempts resulted in an experience of the tip-of-the-tongue state, with women reporting more such experiences than men. The majority of these experiences contained partial information about the target such as the show's characters, actors, or outline. Subjects in the tip-of-the-tongue state were also able to identify the genre and era of the target show with high accuracy and pick it out amongst distractors in a recognition test. Competing responses were relatively infrequent and were usually semantically related to the target show. The similarities and differences between auditory-induced tip-of-the-tongue states and those for other stimuli are discussed.