THE EFFECTS OF IDEA ELABORATION ON UNCONSCIOUS PLAGIARISM

Rates of unconscious plagiarism were investigated using Brown and Murphy's 3-stage paradigm. Initially, participants completed the creative Alternate Uses Test (generation phase) and then at test, recalled their original ideas (recall-own phase) and generated new ideas (generate-new phase). In both of the testing phases, participants plagiarised by reporting someone else's ideas as either their own idea or a new idea. Plagiarism rates increased over a one week retention interval (Experiment 2) and both active and passive participants were equally likely to plagiarise someone else's idea as a new idea (Experiment 1). When an elaboration phase was incorporated into the paradigm, following idea generation, different types of elaboration had clear and consistent effects on participant performance. Elaboration by rating ideas positively and negatively improved correct recall (Experiment 3) and rating the imaginability of ideas (Imagery-elaboration IE) and improving the ideas in three ways (generative-elaboration GE) also increased correct recall to a comparable degree (Experiment 4). In the generate-new phase, these different types of elaboration either reduced plagiarism (Experiment 4) or did not affect the level of plagiarism relative to control (Experiment 3, 5, 6, 7 & 8). However, in the recall-own phase, the GE alone consistently led to the highest levels of unconscious plagiarism (relative to IE or control, Experiment 4, 5, 6, 8). This pattern prevailed when participants were encouraged not to plagiarise by means of a financial incentive (Experiment 5) or when their memory was assessed more stringently by a source monitoring task (Experiment 9). IE did not result in such recalled intrusions, even when it was matched in terms of content to the GE (Experiment 6) or when IE was repeated (3 days after generation) and thus strengthened (Experiment 7). Also, strengthening IE did not affect plagiarism levels in a source monitoring task (Experiment 11). Strengthening GE, on the other hand served to dramatically inflate the observable intrusions in both a recall-own task (Experiment 8) and in a source monitoring task (Experiment 10). Therefore, contrary to a strength account, the probability of plagiarising another's ideas as one's own is linked to the generative nature of the elaboration performed on that idea, rather than its familiarity. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings will be discussed.Economic and Social Research Counci

Unconscious Plagiarism in Recall: Attribution to the Self, but not for Self-Relevant Reasons

Previous research has shown that if people improve other’s ideas, they subsequently unconsciously plagiarise them at a dramatically higher rate than if they imagine them, or simply hear them again. It has been claimed that this occurs because improvement resembles the process of generation, and that these are confused during retrieval. However, an alternate possibility is tested here: plagiarism may increases because improvement increases personal relevance of the ideas. Two studies were conducted in which there was an initial generation phase, followed by an elaboration phase in which participants imagined the previous ideas, improved them for their own use, or improved them for an older adult’s use. One week later, participants attempted to recall their own ideas, and generated new solutions to the previous problems. In both studies, improvement of doubled the rate of subsequent plagiarism in the recall own task, but this effect was not mediated by whether people improved ideas for their own use, of for use by someone else. Improvement had no effect on plagiarism in the generate-new task. These studies therefore rule out personal relevance, or personal semantics as the source of the improvement effect in unconscious plagiarism

Transfer appropriate forgetting: The cue-dependent nature of retrieval-induced forgetting

Retrieval-induced forgetting is the failure to recall a previously studied word following repeated retrieval of a related item. It has been argued that this is due to retrieval competition between practiced and unpracticed items, which results in inhibition of the non-recalled item, detectable with an independent cue at final test. Three experiments were conducted in which two cues were associated with a target item at encoding. All three studies demonstrated retrieval-induced forgetting when the same retrieval cue was present at practice and test, but not when the second encoding cue was used as an independent probe at final test. These data are not compatible with a general inhibitory account of retrieval-induced forgetting, but support a context-specific account of the phenomenon