Unconscious Plagiarism Memory & Cognition

Question: Discuss about theUnconscious Plagiarismfor Memory Cognition. Answer: Introduction Plagiarism is defined as the act of claiming the idea of someone else as their own. It usually refers to appropriation of somebodys idea without the permission of the original writer. However, unconscious plagiarism is referred to the phenomenon when a person claims a particular idea that he has previously experienced, as his own. This essay presents an overview of unconscious plagiarism. Signal detection theory has also presented in this assignment. Various theories of unconscious plagiarism have been also highlighted in this assignment. Signal detection theory refers to the quantification of the ability to discern among the information bearing patterns and the random patterns that deviates from the information. The signal detection theory has four convincible results. These outcomes are hit, miss, false alarm, correct rejection, Hits refer to the signal present and subject says yes, miss refers to the signal present and subject says no. False alarm refers to when the signal is absent and yet the subject says yes. Correct rejection refers the situation where signal is absent and the subject says no. Cryptomnesia refers to the return of the forgotten memories without the consciousness of the subject, and the subject claims certain ideas as their own and original. According to Hollins et al. (2016), this might be referred to as unconscious plagiarism. People might plagiarise without knowing it. However, writers not taking proactive steps to verify, whether their work have already being done previously, end up in uncons cious plagiarism. Memories are not targeted depictions of the past. They are subjective recreation of occasions that are powerless against post-occasion data. According to Lindsay, (2014), three stages of paradigm have been demonstrated by the participants. Unconscious plagiarism occurs when people reproduce the work of another person as their own idea or work. Moreover, manipulation f an original work by a person might result in unconscious plagiarism. The first research paper on unconscious plagiarism proposed a two threshold signal detection model (Perfect Stark, 2008). This model was based on two important assumptions. One assumption was that after the initial generation phase, the ideas that are self generated have more strength than the ideas generated by the others. The second assumption is that the people make discriminations such as a lower threshold used to distinguish the old ideas and works from the new ones and a higher threshold to distinguish between the self-generat ed ideas and ideas generated by others. According to Perfect Stark, (2008), another concept in unconscious plagiarism is recall-own plagiarism phase. This occurs when a persons primary goal is to recall the sensitive information from the past. However, as the source-monitoring tests were incorporated, three staged unconscious plagiarism have been observed. In the three stages of unconscious plagiarism, people are less likely to encounter plagiarism (Stark Perfect, 2007). The three phase process of unconscious plagiarism is as follows: Generation phase: In this phase, the topic is given to the writers and the participants are asked to think of non-traditional uses of certain objects, mentioned in the topic (Stark Perfect, 2008). After a certain time, each participant is asked to give new ideas. Once each of the participants gives their ideas, they are asked to reproduce the second idea on the same topic. This process goes on until each of the participants has given four ideas each. This is an important phase, and each participant needs to think diligently about new ideas on the given topic. Elaboration phase: In this phase, one idea from each of the participants was then subjected to the following conditions. In case of imagery-elaboration ideas the participants are rated in 5-point rating scales (Stark Perfect, 2006). In case of the generative elaboration idea, the participants were supposed to write three ways to improve the given ideas. Control ideas are not presented in this phase. In this phase, the generative elaboration idea is presented in details and the ways to improve the ideas are also mentioned in this phase. Source monitoring phase: This is the final phase of the three phase process. Each of the participants in this phase received a booklet containing the previously generated ideas of other participants. It was observed that among the participants, eight of them had own ideas that were produced at the first phase, was equal to the number of already generated ideas. Unconscious plagiarism occurred when another participants idea was incorrectly labelled as someone elses ideas. It was observed that 80% of the participants were found to have at least one unconscious plagiarism. In order to understand as well as explore the effects of the repeated imagery on subsequent unconscious plagiarism, the ideas of the participants were generated as a group, instead of individual ideas. It has been observed that unconscious plagiarism in the new generation phase and the recall-own task phase have different basis of judgement. Moreover, as argued by (Traniello Bakker, 2016), activation of the strengths might determine the output as memory strength increase leads to greater discrimination among the new as well as the old ideas. Unconscious plagiarism or inadvertent plagiarism was first tested by Brown and Murphy in 1989. Since then, various researches have attempted to conduct various experiments on this topic. Whether plagiarism is a conscious or unconscious act or an offence is still a debatable topic. However, various researches on unconscious plagiarism have observed a clear demarcation between recall-own plagiarism and generation of new plagiarism. Another theoretical account is the source monitoring framework. In this account, the consequent accuracy of the sources has been observed. This assignment presents an overview of unconscious plagiarism and the various phases of unconscious plagiarism. Signal detection based unconscious plagiarism includes four phases. These are the hits, miss, correct rejection and false alarm. Unconscious plagiarism is different in case of recall-own plagiarism as well as generation of new plagiarism. It has been observed that unconscious plagiarism in case of recall-own work is likely to occur more than generation of new plagiarism. Plagiarism needs to be eliminated and unconscious plagiarism has to be reduced if possible. References Hollins, T. J., Lange, N., Dennis, I., Longmore, C. A. (2016). Social influences on unconscious plagiarism and anti-plagiarism.Memory,24(7), 884-902. Lindsay, D. S. (2014). Memory source monitoring applied.The SAGE handbook of applied memory, 59-75. Perfect, T. J., Stark, L. J. (2008). Why do I always have the best ideas? The role of idea quality in unconscious plagiarism.Memory,16(4), 386-394. Perfect, T. J., Stark, L. J. (2008). Tales from the Crypt... omnesia.A handbook of metamemory and memory, 285-314. Stark, L. J., Perfect, T. J. (2007). Whose idea was that? Source monitoring for idea ownership following elaboration.Memory,15(7), 776-783. Stark, L. J., Perfect, T. J. (2008). The effects of repeated idea elaboration on unconscious plagiarism.Memory cognition,36(1), 65-73. Stark, L. J., Perfect, T. J. (2006). Elaboration inflation: How your ideas become mine.Applied Cognitive Psychology,20(5), 641-648. Traniello, J. F., Bakker, T. C. (2016). Intellectual theft: pitfalls and consequences of plagiarism.