To throw another anecdote into the bucket, whenever I'm asked for the last four digits of my ssn or phone number, I have to mentally say the whole thing.
I can remember the last four digits of either explicitly but I still say the whole thing back in my head as an error correction mechanism.
It’s like being an LLM: once I’ve got the first three tokens, the rest just flows out but if I remember the last four on their own, there’s a much higher chance of making an error.
