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Further Insight into Cognitive and Metacognitive Processes of the Tip-of-the-Tongue State with an Amnesic Drug as Cognitive Tool

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Trends and Prospects in Metacognition Research

Abstract

The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state may be viewed as temporary and reversible micro-amnesia. Amnesic drugs, such as benzodiazepines, may be used as tools to reveal functional principles of normal cognitive processes. We investigated the effects of lorazepam on TOT state. With general information questions, Lorazepam participants provided more commission errors and more TOT states following commissions than placebo participants, whereas the resolution of the TOTs was unimpaired. The higher amount of incorrect recalls provided by lorazepam participants may partially result from the fact that they are more frequently in a state of transitory inaccessibility of a known item, identifiable as a commission TOT (participants provide a persistent alternate and experience the phenomenological TOT only after having been informed of the error). This way of resolving the TOT conflict is discussed in light of the anxiolytic effect of the drug. Lorazepam led the participants to generate more persistent alternates when in a TOT while preserving the cognitive process of TOT, that is, the temporary failure to retrieve a known word.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Moses illusion is as follows: When asked “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?” people fail to notice the distortion introduced by the impostor “Moses” and respond “two”. This semantic illusion, which is known as the Moses illusion, has proved to be quite robust and can be generalized across other materials and conditions.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Inserm and by a Cognitique “Impairments and recovery of cognitive functions” grant from the French Ministry of Research. The author wishes to thank Marie Izaute, Bennett Schwartz, and Laurence Paire-Ficout for their valuable contribution to the TOT study.

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  1. Psychiatry Department, National Institute for Health and Medical Research (U 666 INSERM) and University Hospital, BP 426, 67091, Strasbourg Cedex, France

    Elisabeth Bacon

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  1. Elisabeth Bacon
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Correspondence to Elisabeth Bacon .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, 541 24, Greece

    Anastasia Efklides

  2. Dept. Primary Education, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, 451, Greece

    Plousia Misailidi

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Bacon, E. (2010). Further Insight into Cognitive and Metacognitive Processes of the Tip-of-the-Tongue State with an Amnesic Drug as Cognitive Tool. In: Efklides, A., Misailidi, P. (eds) Trends and Prospects in Metacognition Research. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6546-2_5

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