Tip of the tongue (TOT)

People often say if you can explain concepts to others then that is when you truly understand it: let me have an attempt..what is tip of the tongue?

Tip of the tongue occurs when you know you have something in memory but temporarily cannot retrieve it. e.g. you remember that face from somewhere but you cant quite remember the name....sound familar?

there are two theories related to this phenomena. the first is called the Baker/baker paradox and the other is the 'Cinderella and the ugly sisters'. the baker/baker paradox refers to a study which found that participants remember occupations of people (baker) better than people's names (Mr Baker).

The reason is that remembering the name requires 3 steps in this particular order: perceptual, conceptual (C)and phonological (P). in order to move for C to P, it involves a lexical connection when considering a common name, baker. However when considering a proper name, Mr Baker it involves another step called a person identity node (PIN).

The distinguishing feature between these two is that there are many possible conceptual links linking C to the lexical level (e.g. concepts of baker include kitchen ,bread, getting up early), which subsequently prompt the phonological name, baker (so it goes something like visual - conceptual - lexical - phonological). But for proper names, the lexical level only has one activation node, which is the PIN (Mr Baker) hence the proper name is harder to come by. in laymans term, it is easier to come up with examples or concepts relating to a 'baker' than to the person 'mr baker'....

now onto the cinderella story. a study found that another reason for TOT is the blocking of action slips. An analogy was made such that the memory search (prince) tries to find the correct word (Cinderella) to fit the defintion (slipper), but the related words (ugly stepsisters) intercept the search effort. The ugly stepsisters divert the prince's attention from Cinderella....i quite like this analogy (but I wonder what happened to the fairy godmother???)...haha.

congratulations for reaching so far down...i think i've confused you enough. i should go back to cramming...have been rather unproductive...could do better....