Psychologists think cryptomnesia happens when we fail to register the source of information — what’s known as a source-monitoring error. As our brains amass memories, details are ranked. In this filtering process, the origins of facts often fall secondary to the facts themselves.
Cryptomnesia may actually be a byproduct of an otherwise efficient memory system, Dr. Gingerich said. “If you think about it, it’s not very cognitively efficient to remember every single detail of everything that happens to us.”
Alan S. Brown and Dana R. Murphy conducted early experiments on cryptomnesia in the late 1980s at Southern Methodist University. They asked participants in a group setting to take turns naming items in different categories, including sports, musical instruments and four-legged animals.
Later, the researchers asked participants to recall the items they had come up with, and to brainstorm new examples. In both tasks, nearly three-fourths named at least one item that someone else in the group had already mentioned. Plagiarized responses accounted for 7 percent to 9 percent of the total.
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