is there possibility for spontaneous retrieval?

The Malin, Wagner, Schacter article writes that the TOT state is marked by recovery of partial information from long term memory. This leads to a sense of familiarity about the target trying to be retrieved. However, this familiarity does not actually help to retrieve the target information. The article states that the familiarity does not produce a coherent enough body of information about the target to aid in retrieval, and thus the retrieval effort is led to failure. In fact, some of the information retrieved that leads to this sense of familiarity may be related to the target in such a way that retrieving the target information actually becomes more difficult.

Burke & MacKay elaborate on the idea of retrieved information prolonging the TOT state in the Schacter article when the “ugly sister” theory of blocking during the TOT state is discussed. Schacter writes that “often we tend to embrace the ugly sisters because they provide a comforting feeling of being “close” to the target and thus reassure us that we are about to resolve the TOT.” I noted examples of this in my own subjects when they were in a TOT state. One subject continued to repeat the name “Angela Lansbury” to himself while trying to recall the name “Annette Bening”. This repetition did not serve to help him ever remember the name Annette Bening, but, still, he continued to return to the non-target name. The sense of familiarity discussed by Marlin, Wagner, & Schacter in their TOT paper is not exactly what Schacter is discussing when he refers to the “ugly sister”. However, I think that the ugly sister model is useful in understanding how seemingly related and coherent information (which leads to the feeling of familiarity generated during the TOT state) can actually mislead a person trying to retrieve a target information. For example I noted that subjects were prone to repeating information about the target that was retrieved, rather than attempting to retrieve new information about the target. For example when trying to retrieve the name “Ben Stiller” the subject would return to the movies that the actor had been in, listing them off or trying to imagine what the movie cover looked like. Although these attempted cues had already been (unsuccessfully) tried before, the subject continued to return to them for aid.

I thought that this idea of retrieval of related information (and sometimes unrelated, as with the case of ugly sister information) actually inhibiting the retrieval of the target information was really interesting. Schacter speaks quite a bit to the idea of semantic organization and why retrieval of information related to the character of a proper noun does not help to retrieve that noun due to the lack of coherent connect and to the abstract nature of the connotation between the actual sound of the target and the information that is retrieved while searching for the target. It is, therefore, not surprising to note that the information that is retrieved is not used at all to actually retrieve the target information. Schacter states that one third of TOTs are resolved by a spontaneous or involuntary “pop up” of the target information. He states, however, that these spontaneous retrievals are probably not spontaneous. His evidence for this is that in a lab setting subjects who narrate their thoughts have traceable cues for the target retrieval. This information somewhat frustrated me. Firstly I felt like in this case what was found in the lab setting may not be cohesive with the way the retrieval works in the “real world”. Although I think that it is possible that there is external cuing which activate the retrieval of the target information, I think that it would be somewhat shortsighted to ignore the possibility which Schacter presents and then disagrees with: “the influence of ugly sisters has dissipates over time” and there is an “incubation process that operate[s] outside of awareness”. Perhaps the word spontaneous is not correct. Perhaps there is a cueing processes at hand. However, I would say that in “nature” rather than the cue for the retrieval coming from a stream of consciousness, as it does in the lab setting, the cue is so deeply embedded “outside of awareness” that there is no external stimulation- or traceable stimulation. It is purely internal, complicated, multi-faceted stimulation which leads to the retrieval of the target information. Overlooking this idea could possibly lead to overlooking a huge possibility for the way in which the mind stores and retrieves information, not to mention distinct ideas of how the mind works in general. Would it be so far fetched to think of a situation in which target information is retrieved during a dream, or in a similar state that lacks a coherent narrative-like state of consciousness? I know that Schacter is not saying that all cues are external. And he is certainly cannot be labeling the brain as so one dimensional. I suppose I just don’t see how without prescribing to these two views (external cuing and a “one dimensional” brain) he can rule out the possibility of spontaneous cuing.