Aaron was solving a crossword puzzle. The clue for a seven-letter word said "prose literature, not based on facts." Aaron was confident that he knew the word, but kept coming up with other words such as "faction," "friction," and "fraction." After saying these few words out loud, Aaron suddenly remembered the correct word: "fiction." In this scenario, Aaron experienced the .

tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

Explanation:

The situation that Aaron experienced in this example is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (TOT). The TOT is the phenomenon of trying to retrieve a word from memory but failing. However, when this occurs, we often achieve a partial recall and feel that retrieval is imminent. In this case, Aaron felt that he knew the word, and could come up with similar ones, proving that this is the situation he found himself in.

alone =having no one else present.