More Brain Points

It’s on the Tip of Your Tongue

            Have you ever watched a movie and felt as if you recognized an actor but could not figure out what other movie you had seen him in? Or recognized someone’s face walking down the street but couldn’t place where you had met? These can become very aggravating situations. In scenarios such as the movie one you may get the opportunity to put your mind at ease by looking it up online. This is often called recognition without identification (RWI) or tip-of-the –tongue (TOT) phenomenon.

In Cleary, Ryals, and Nomi’s article entitled “ Intuitively detecting what is hidden within a visual mask: Familiar—novel discrimination and threat detection for unidentified stimuli” described their study of how differencing novel from familiar stimuli can aide decision making skills. They studied this by presenting participants with filtered pictures of famous faces and scenes in their first two experiments. In their third experiment they tested to see the familiarity people gain when presented with threating and non threatening stimuli both living and inanimate.  People had trouble pinpointing the person or scene, but they did have greater familiarity with the filtered scenes over the filtered faces. There was a greater familiarity for things that were threatening and an even greater familiarity for a threat coming from something living.

            People typically worry that these phenomenon to their impending memory loss. A study by Mandell T. Salthouse, published in Psychological Science, studied this correlation. They used 718 people with ages ranging from 18 to 99. Memory tests were preformed, and participants were asked to recall specific memories. These episodic memory tests included a series of vocabulary tests. People with memory loss often are presented with having deficits in episodic memory. Afterwards, tip-of-the-tongue tests were administered. During these TOT tests participants were given definitions, descriptions, and pictures and were asked to put a name to the information provided. The results showed that the number of tip-of-the-tongue experiences increase with age with twenty year olds having two to three experiences and eighty year olds having close to ten. They did not find a direct correlation between tip-of-the-tongue experiences and memory loss.

            People are constantly being bombarded with information every second of every day. The ability to have a familiarity with something even if a name cannot be recalled can help people navigate through any situation life throws at them. Many people call this familiarity intuition. More research still needs to be done on how this intuition is developed. TOT experiences are frustrating but act just like a RWI. It would be interesting to understand the mechanism that these TOT experiences manifest as people age.

Cleary, Anne M., Anthony J. Ryals, and Jason S. Nomi. "Intuitively Detecting What Is Hidden within a Visual Mask: Familiar--novel Discrimination and Threat Detection for Unidentified Stimuli." (2013): 989-99.

Salthouse T, Mandell A. Do Age-Related Increases in Tip-of-the-Tongue Experiences Signify Episodic Memory Impairments? Psychological Science. 2013.