No evidence of age-related increases in unconscious plagiarism during free recall

Abstract

In three experiments younger and older participants took part in a group generation task prior to a delayed recall task. In each, participants were required to recall the items that they had generated, avoiding plagiarism errors. All studies showed the same pattern: older adults did not plagiarise their partners any more than younger adults did. However, older adults were more likely than younger adults to intrude with entirely novel items not previously generated by anyone. These findings stand in opposition to the single previous demonstration of age-related increases in plagiarism during recall.

Keywords:

• Unconscious plagiarism
• Ageing
• Recall
• Instrusions

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the Nuffield Foundation who provided the financial support for part of the work reported here (grant number URB/35805 awarded to the first author). The work was also supported by a Joined Research Grant (ARC 06/11-337) from the Belgian French Community. Hedwige Dehon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). The authors also thank Serge Brédart, Karen Mitchell, and David McCabe for their helpful comments on a previous draft of this manuscript.

Notes

¹Additionally they reported that age differences in generate-new plagiarism were mediated by working memory capacity. However, they did not carry out any such analysis on recall-own plagiarism, which is the focus here.

²This analysis reports the outcome when we carried out a linear transformation of all scales to a 5-point scale and then took the unweighted average across all six scales. We also ran an analysis in which we collapsed the data by taking z-scores of each scale, and averaged those. This second analysis produced the same outcome, and so we report the simpler average score here.