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 hypo

SUBMITTER: Metcalfe J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5514176 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature