Language and consciousness

Temporal structure has a major role in human understanding of everyday events. Observers are able to segment ongoing activity into temporal parts and sub-parts that are reliable, meaningful and correlated with ecologically relevant features of the action. Here we present evidence that a network of brain regions is tuned to perceptually salient event boundaries, both during intentional event segmentation and during naive passive viewing of events. Activity within this network may provide a basis for parsing the temporally evolving environment into meaningful units.

The tip-of-the-tongue experience (TOT) has intrigued psychologists for nearly a century. R. Brown and McNeil (1966) provided the first systematic exploration of the phenomenon, and the findings since their seminal study suggest that TOTs (a) are a nearly universal experience, (b) occur about once a week, (c) increase with age, (d) are frequently elicited by proper names, (e) often enable access to the target word's first letter, (f) are often accompanied by words related to the target, and (g) are resolved during the experience about half of the time. Important questions remain concerning TOTs: (a) Are emotional reactions necessary, (b) do only low frequency targets elicit TOTs, (c) do TOTs reflect incomplete target word activation or interference from related words, and (d) do spontaneous retrievals really occur? A more precise definition of the TOT experience is needed, as well as greater uniformity in the information gathered during TOTs.