Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

In my lab, we recently discovered a new type of cognitive bias brought on by the presence of a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state for a currently inaccessible word. When in a TOT state, participants think it more likely that a currently unretrievable word was presented in a darker, clearer font upon last seeing it, a larger font upon last seeing it, that it is of higher frequency in the language, and that it starts with a more common first letter in the language. This pattern suggests that TOT states bias people to infer that the unretrieved target information has qualities that tend to characterize fluency or accessibility, even when that is not the case. In further studies, we have found that the TOT’s biasing effects also extend to the immediately surrounding circumstances during the TOT as well. For example, people judge celebrity faces as belonging to more ethical people when in a TOT state for the name than when not, and rate their inclination to take an unrelated gamble as being higher when in a TOT state t