Janie is taking an exam in her history class. On the exam there is a question that asks her to state and discuss the five major causes of the Trans-Caspian War. Janie remembers four of them. She knows there is a fifth and can almost remember it; she knows that it is something like taxes. Janie is walking down the stairs, when all of a sudden, she remembers that the fifth point is taxes, but it is too late. Janie was suffering from
A) encoding problems
B) storage inversion
C) the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
D) evaluation overload
E) anterograde amnesia

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Janie's experience is an example of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, which is the feeling of knowing a piece of information but having difficulty retrieving it from memory. This is different from encoding problems, which occur when information is not properly encoded into memory in the first place, and anterograde amnesia, which is the loss of the ability to form new memories after an event. Storage inversion and evaluation overload are not recognized psychological phenomena.

Janie Is Taking an Exam in Her History Class