Giving and stealing ideas in memory: Source errors in recall are influenced by both early-selection and late-correction retrieval processes

Abstract

Previous studies of unconscious plagiarism have asked participants to recall their own ideas from a previous group-problem solving session, and have typically reported that people mistakenly include a partner's responses when trying to recall their own. To date, there has been little research looking at the propensity to include one's own responses when trying to recall a partner's previous contribution to the group. Experiment 1 demonstrated that people make both kinds of source-error during recall, but source errors are more common in the recall-partner task. This pattern was replicated in Experiments 2a and 2b with source-errors and intrusions increasing over a delay. Experiment 3 used an extended version of each recall task, in which participants reported all items that came to mind, whilst indicating which responses were goal-relevant. The tendency for source-errors to occur more for the recall-partner task was shown to be a function of both idea availability and output monitoring, whereas the tendency for source-errors to increase over a delay was shown to be due solely to output monitoring. Thus, unconscious plagiarism errors are one instantiation of the more general problem of source-specified recall, which is influenced jointly by processes at generation and output monitoring.