Tip-of-the-Tongue Syndrome (TotTS) and Transactive Memory - An aside

Tip-of-the-tongue syndrome is an experience so common that cultures worldwide have a phrase for it.

Cheyenne Indians call it navonotootse’a, which means “I have lost it on my tongue”; in Korean it’s hyeu kkedu-te mam-dol-da, which has an even more gorgeous translation: “sparkling at the end of my tongue.”

The phenomenon generally lasts only a minute or so; your brain eventually makes the connection.

But … when faced with a tip-of-the-tongue moment, many of us have begun to rely instead on the Internet to locate information on the fly.

If life-logging … stores “episodic,” or personal, memories, Internet search engines do the same for a different sort of memory: “semantic” memory, or factual knowledge about the world.

When you visit Paris and have a wonderful time drinking champagne at a café, your personal experience is an episodic memory.

Your ability to remember that Paris is a city and that champagne is an alcoholic beverage – that’s semantic memory. …

What’s the line between our own, in-brain knowledge and the sea of information around us? Does it make us smarter when we can dip in so instantly? Or dumber with every search?

Thompson, the author of the book 'Smarter than you Think,' reminds us of the anecdote, by now itself familiar “to the point of banality,” about Socrates and his admonition that the “technology” of writing would devastate the Greek tradition of debate and dialectic, and would render people incapable of committing anything to memory because “knowledge stored was not really knowledge at all.”

He cites Socrates’s parable of the Egyptian god Theuth and how he invented writing, offering it as a gift to the king of Egypt, Thamus, who met the present with defiant indignation:

"This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. 

 

The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality".

Read more of this article by Mary Popova

TOT: Tip-of-the-Tongue and Word Retrieval Deficits in Dyslexia

Tip-of-the-Tongue and Word Retrieval Deficits in Dyslexia -- Hanly and Vandenberg 43 (1): 15 -- Journal of Learning Disabilities

Wikipedia provides a good explanation of TOT It is summarised below;

The tip of the tongue (TOT or Presque vu, from the French for "almost seen") phenomenon is an instance of knowing something that cannot immediately be recalled.

TOT is understood to be an adverse experience or difficulty that we have with our memory recollection. It involves having difficulty retrieving a well-known word or familiar name.

When experiencing TOT, people feel that the blocked word is on the verge of being recovered. So, despite the failure in finding or recalling the word, people have the feeling that the blocked word is figuratively "on the tip of the tongue."

Inaccessibility and the sense of imminence are the two key features of an operational definition of TOTs (A.S. Brown, 1991).

There is a hypothesis that Dyslexia involves phonological processing deficits but not semantic process deficits. To test this hypothesis research scientists brought together a number of children and used tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) responses on a picture-naming task.

Participants in the test included 16 children who were known to be suffering from dyslexia and 31 control children between 8 and 10 years of age who did not differ in receptive vocabulary.

The research seemed to confirm the hypothesis; children with dyslexia demonstrated more TOTs and proportionally more errors in the phonological step of word retrieval but not in the semantic steps. Longer and low-frequency words also prompted more TOTs.

The researchers believe the results provide good evidence of text-independent, on-line phonological processing deficits in readers with dyslexia.

Another Study
A separate study (Maril et al., 2001, p. 657) also found that while attempting to retrieve information, subjects relied heavily on visual spatial clues in correctly retrieving the information.

For example, some subjects in the study that were trying to recall a name described looking at the person's face in attempting to retrieve the name.

Also, when trying to recall the name of an author, the subjects described attempting to read the name of the author from an imagined book.

The authors of the study suggest that the subjects in the fMRI study used a visual imagery strategy when trying to resolve a TOT condition.

This is something that may be familiar when you consider your own memory recollection strategies and that of your children.

Additional Reading
For more information on TOT, including it's use in signing for the deaf and the experiences of multilingual speakers, click on the link to USAToday.