Dataset Information

The tip-of-the-tongue state and curiosity.

ABSTRACT: Theories of study time allocation and of curiosity suggest that people are most engaged with and want to devote their time to materials that are not completely mastered but also are not so difficult that they might be impossible. Their curiosity is thought to be triggered by items that are almost known, or are in what is sometimes called the region of proximal learning. Answers that are on the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT)-not immediately recallable but nevertheless evoking a feeling of imminent recall-seem, intuitively, to be materials that have this characteristic of being almost, but not quite, fully known. We therefore, hypothesized that people would be particularly curious to see the answers to questions for which the answers were on the tips of their tongues. To test the TOT curiosity hypothesis, we gave participants 82 general information questions and quickly asked whether the answers were or were not on the tips of their tongues and whether they wanted to see the answers later. Overwhelmingly, items that were accompanied by a TOT feeling were those which evoked participants' curiosity, regardless of whether the feeling occurred in conjunction with an error of commission, an error of omission, or even with the correct answer.

SUBMITTER: Metcalfe J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5514176 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The tip-of-the-tongue state and curiosity.

Metcalfe Janet J Schwartz Bennett L BL Bloom Paul A PA

Cognitive research: principles and implications 20170718 1

Theories of study time allocation and of curiosity suggest that people are most engaged with and want to devote their time to materials that are not completely mastered but also are not so difficult that they might be impossible. Their curiosity is thought to be triggered by items that are almost known, or are in what is sometimes called the region of proximal learning. Answers that are on the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT)-not immediately recallable but nevertheless evoking a feeling of imminent recal ...[more]

PMID: 28776003

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Project description:Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states are typically defined as feelings of imminent recall for known, but temporarily inaccessible target words. However, TOTs are not merely instances of retrieval failures. Clues that increase the subjective likelihood of retrieval success, such as cue familiarity and target-related information, also have been shown to elicit feelings of imminent recall, supporting a metacognitive, inferential etiology of the TOT phenomenon. A survey conducted on our university campus provided anecdotal evidence that TOTs are occasionally shared among people in small groups. Although shared TOTs may suggest the influence of social contagion, we hypothesized that metacognitive appraisal of group recall efficiency could be involved. There should be more instances of remembering in several heads than in one. From this, we conjectured that people remembering together entertain the inference that successful retrieval is more likely in group recall than in a single-person recall situation. Such a metacognitive appraisal may drive a stronger feeling of closeness with the target word and of recall imminence, precipitating one (or more people) into a TOT state. We used general knowledge questions to elicit TOTs. We found that participants reported more TOTs when remembering in small groups than participants remembering alone. Critically, the experimental manipulation selectively increased TOTs without affecting correct recall, suggesting that additional TOTs observed in small groups were triggered independently from the retrieval process. Near one third (31%) of the TOTs in small groups were reported by two or more participants for the same items. However, removing common TOTs from the analyses did not change the basic pattern of results, suggesting that social contagion was not the main factor involved in the observed effect. We argue that beyond social contagion, group recall magnifies the inference that target words will be successfully retrieved, prompting the metacognitive monitoring system to launch more near-retrieval success "warning" (TOT) signals than in a single-person recall situation.

Dataset Information

The tip-of-the-tongue state and curiosity.

Publications

The tip-of-the-tongue state and curiosity.

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