Tip-of-the-Tongue and Retrieval-Induced Forgetting: Selection and Inhibition Accounts

Have you ever momentarily forgotten the name of a specific place, or person, despite being able to recall many things about the name (for example the first few letters, or the number of syllables)? Chances are, if you've experienced this "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon, you've also had the word spontaneously occur to you minutes or hours later. One explanation for this fascinating failure of memory is retrieval-induced forgetting, in which the retrieval of closely related concepts and words actually competes with the word or concept you intended to retrieve.

This is the basic phenomenon investigated by a 2004 article by Johnson & Anderson in a slightly different context. The authors begin by reviewing the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomena and how it may relate to retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). Although "blocking," "interference" and "unlearning" mechanisms can explain the basic findings in TOT and RIF, according to Johnson & Anderson they cannot explain why the unretrieved items are also inaccessible when completely different cues are provided (known as cue-independence, discussed previously). For this kind of effect, Johnson & Anderson suggest that an active process of inhibition must exist.

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