This popped into my mind the other day, and I’ve been distracted by it since… You know when you’re trying to recall something, and a wrong answer pops into your head, but you know it’s wrong. Like how does that work? E.g. if you’re trying to remember who made a song, and your brain can almost simultaneously go - oh it’s that band, and then oh no not them. It feels like there has to be two (at least) parts of the brain working on it at the same time.
Maybe I’ll be lucky and a neuroscientist will drop in and link me to a paper. More likely it’s something to discuss with wild speculation. Either way, I’m hoping writing it down will stop it distracting me.
Really, what you are asking about is called metamemory. Knowing the jargon in the domain might help you find more useful information. Neuroscientists have examined how the brain monitors and corrects error. For example, here is a paper that examines what regions of the brain appear to be responsible for error correction in a semantic recall task. In some sense, you are right, there are multiple parts of the brain working on recall and error correction at once, but you should really think of the brain as a larger system whose components work together in the same way the fuel injectors and pistons of an engine are part of a larger whole.
That’s very helpful thank you. I read the abstract of the paper, I think it might take me a couple of goes to really grok it. I think it’s testing why are more likely to correct a wrong answer given on a test (in a subsequent test), if they are enthusiastically told it’s right the first time. This is compared to if they are told that they might be wrong!
Given it’s the first time I’ve heard of this, I’m finding even the premise a challenge! ‘Hypercorrection’ apparently, for anyone not going to the paper.
What I’ve read of the article, meta memory seems to be more about our ability to judge how well we know something, rather than evaluate if our recall is correct.
I say ‘rather’… The concepts are obviously (or maybe not obviously!) related, but that sounds like assigning a score to the information we possess. While my original question was around evaluating knowledge as incorrect after recall.
That’s why the engine analogy doesn’t quite work for me. It’s not one answer, it’s two! So if it is an engine, it’s one that drives the car both forwards and backwards initially, and then switches off the one it doesn’t need.
I’m definitely going to read more into these concepts though. Thanks again for the links!