More seriously, re Biden's Mitterand/Macron gaffe ⬆️, it's a nice example of an "everyday-memory" error, i.e. an error of active forgetting, a failure of the #cognitive inhibition-based capacity to select from among competing cognitive contents.
In other words, it's not that #Biden couldn't "remember" Macron was president: that content is most certainly "in there." Rather, he failed to inhibit or 'actively forget' the context inappropriate Mitterand content.
I wonder if the activated set widens/generalizes with age -- again due to the failure of inhibition which, even at this micro level, requires an energy expenditure.
But we also know these confusion errors implicate phonological as well as semantic memory processing, and we note that both "Mitterand" and "Macron" begin with the same phoneme and end with a similar syllable.
@dsmith@cogsci@cognition@neuroscience Absolutely right, yes. Active ongoing auto-perception triggering pattern completion. I've actually been thinking a lot about this cognitive process recently, particularly in terms of mnemotechniques used by the bards of old to facilitate both learning and retelling of epics. E.g. the first pair in a rhyme propels recollection forward via pattern completion, etc.
Besides semantic and acoustic factors, prosody can also play a role. Like most classroom Ts, I sometimes confused the names of students when I had a lot on my mind (not a memory issue -- it's excellent). I noticed I was much more likely to confuse names with the same # of syllables. While Mitterand is one more syllable than Macron, it rolls out in fluent speech like a 2-syllable word.