Item availability in cryptomnesia: Assessing its role in two paradigms of unconscious plagiarism.

Three experiments explored the assumptions underlying the relative strength model used by R. L. Marsh and G. H. Bower (1993) to account for laboratory-induced cryptomnesia (unconscious plagiarism). That model accounted for source and occurrence forgetting in unconscious plagiarism paradigms by assuming that items from different sources possess different strengths. That assumption had never been explicitly tested. In Experiment 1, results from a lexical-decision task supported the strength model using a word-search puzzle paradigm. In Experiment 2, which used a category generation paradigm, similar results demonstrated that later plagiarized items were indeed more available compared with items that were not later plagiarized. In Experiment 3, the strength of self- versus other-generated items was independently manipulated, resulting in large amounts of cryptomnesia that differed in ways specifically predicted by the model. These results are discussed in light of current models of source attributions and memory. Implicit memory tasks such as word-fragment completion and degraded-word identification demonstrate that people use information from their past experience while reporting neither awareness of that past nor a conscious attempt to retrieve it