Cryptomnesia: Delineating inadvertent plagiarism.

Cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, was experimentally examined in three investigations. Subjects were required to generate category exemplars, alternating with 3 other subjects in Experiments 1 and 2 or with a standardized, written list in Experiment 3. After this generation stage, subjects attempted to recall those items which they had just generated and an equal number of completely new items from each category. Plagiarism of others' generated responses occurred in all three tasks (generation, recall own, and recall new) in each experiment, despite instructions to avoid such intrusions. The amount of plagiarism was greater under more complex generation sequences and for items produced from orthorgraphic relative to semantic categories. The most likely source of plagiarized responses was the person who had responded just before the subject in the generation sequence. Directions for future research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)