[famouswaffles]

Recall isn't naturally bidirectional, even for humans. If you are learning vocabulary in a new language, it's common advice to practice both target > source and source > target. Doing only one-way often makes you much better recalling that single direction than both.

[appplication]

I would need further convincing that humans do not naturally tend towards bidirectional recall.

Perhaps I’m just on alert anytime I see an LLM-ism that’s met with a claim that the same or similar phenomena holds true in humans as well.

[famouswaffles]

'Naturally' might not be the best word? Maybe 'Necessarily' would be better?

Regardless, it's something that happens in people. Have you not or seen someone else struggle to recall a specific fact or memory until phrased or induced in a certain way?

You probably could also say LLMs 'tend towards bidirectional recall' over the course of training as things that ought to be recalled both ways are reinforced to do so. In the above example, you will also eventually learn both ways with enough exposure even without explicit practice.

[mhl47]

If you can touch type try this: Go through they keys once alphabetical 'abcd...' recalling the movement from the letter. Then do it the other way round and move your fingers in spatial sequence to the keys and try to recall the letter.

You will find the former much easier if you did not by chance also memorize the keyboard layout for some reason.

[djaro]

This is very obvious any time you try to create exhaustive lists of something.

For example, for every country in the world, I would recognize it and say, yeah, thats a country.

But if I had to write all ~200 countries into a list, I would probably miss quite a few.

Or, if you gave me names of all US presidents, I would for each of them go, oh yeah, thats a president. But ask me "name all the presidents", I wouldnt get further than 10.

[klausa]

This is something that anyone learning a foreign language could tell you is very much a thing.

Understanding a word when you hear it, is frequently much easier than remembering the same word when trying to speak/write the language.

[jonahrd]

What about the fact that "What is the weird band from the early 2000s in Michigan who wore colored ties?" could be a bar trivia question (challenging enough to recall to be fun), while "Who are Tally Hall?" could not

[pants2]

Only because one is a short answer and the other is not

[timr]

Do you mean that you don't believe that humans learning a language have the problem the parent described? Because I do, and everyone I've ever met while learning does as well.

Do you mean that you don't believe the problem exists in general, because here's another example: if you give a song title, I can easily hum the opening. If you give me the opening, I cannot reliably name the song.