Why the Tip of the Tongue Experience Is Emotional

Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon as Metacognitive Experience

We have all had that moment when we feel that we know what we should say but are unable to say it. We can picture the word in question, letters associated with that word, sometimes we even voice the first letter of the word. We get the feeling that we can recall a work but cannot access it right away. This is what the tip-of-the-tongue state is like in experiential terms. Many of us use the saying it is stuck on the tip of my tongue without realizing that this an actual term studied and defined through psychology.

The tip of the tongue phenomenon (TOT) was first viewed as a psychological phenomenon by William James but he did not label it as such (James, 1890). More research with time arose regarding the concept covered by Sigmund Freud who discussed the subject as an unconscious psychological factor that may cause a person to forget familiar words. (Freud, 1965).

It was not until Roger Brown and David McNeil (1966) wrote their article in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior that three states were associated with the tip of the tongue or "TOT" as it is often referred to. The three stages at the time that were recognized were first that people "recognized the word read by the exprimentor as the word they had been seeking," second they remembered and stated the word read before it was said to them, and lastly they remembered and stated the word " before the word was read to them but it was not the intended target" (Brown, McNeill, 1966, p. 325).

During the study conducted by Brown and McNeil when people experience TOT they were asked to talk about the target way in a descript manner by describing the letter that they thought the word to begin with, how many syllables they felt it had, what they thought the word sounded like, meant, etc. (Brown, McNeill, 1966, p. 325).

The question now is whether TOT is the result of lexical retrieval failure or metacognitive awareness.

Lexical retrieval failure is a cognitive state "of temporary inaccessibility" (Schwartz, 2006, p. 149).

Metacognitive awareness represents a state of emotion -- that is, the "feeling of temporary inaccessibility" (Schwartz, 2006, p. 149).

In other words, lexical retrieval is defined as a matter of cognition whereas metacognitive experience is defined as a matter that goes beyond cognition, and in the case of TOT, is related to the impact of emotions. TOT, according to Schwartz (2006) is a state of metacognitive experience, as his research indicates.

Schwartz and Metcalfe (2011) point out that the majority of studies focusing on TOT emphasize the "unretrieved target" but what they emphasize is the emotional trigger that the question which instigates the TOT prompts in the individual (p. 737). The TOT phenomenon therefore is one that has its causality in "a variety of cues, heuristics" that produce an emotional reaction in the individual. The TOT state is the effect of this emotional reaction and should thus be considered a metacognitive experience (Scwartz, Metcalfe, 2011, p. 737).

The study by (Oh-Lee et al., 2012) indicates that the "TOT metacognitive function may not be directly related to dopamine deficiency," a point which explains the role of the "overall prefrontal executive networks" in the brain during the TOT phenomenon (p. 174079). Oh-Lee et al.'s (2012) study of the brain control processes during TOT indicate that what happens in the brain is still as of yet unknown regarding this issue.