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.
I don’t know the exact neuroscience behind it, but suspect this relates to the fallibility of memory, and whatever goes in in the brain during learning and reasoning.
So you know of multiple bands and songs, you attempt to relate a specific band and song, but because of some murky memories and rough recall, you briefly relate the wrong pieces of information, recognize the mistake, and correct for it. How that process works precisely may vary across people and their methods of recall and knowing.
In a way I suspect that the false-positive you mention may be a sort of synaptic shortcut to the correct information through whatever systems are at play in the brain for this reasoning. For some it may be that this process of rapid error correction is sometimes faster than immediate, accurate recall, or may be more of an unconscious aspect of accurate recall.
I’m certain (indeed more certain than I likely should be, which may be meta-meta memory?!) that what you say that the end is the case. There’s almost certainly a bias towards error correction over direct recall. Certainly my experience is of testing wrong answers in my head before alighting on the right one.
That implies a set up more like an adversarial neural network (I’m not saying this is actually how it is, just trying to draw an analogy from something I understand), as opposed to a function in code. But that seems like a bit of a waste, but also means that two (or more) distinct processes could be working on the same task?