ABSTRACT
You are at a family dinner, in the middle of recalling a favorite childhood holiday, only to learn that you weren’t actually there, or even born yet. In fact, what you were recalling as your own memory is actually someone else’s. Besides embarrassment, you might also feel confused about why that content felt so easy to retrieve – after all, what you were remembering was a false not a real experience. From one moment to the next, people are aware of the ease or difficulty of ongoing cognitive activity – when we are trying to remember, when we are trying to imagine, or even when we are trying to read something, we have a sense of how easy the task feels (for a review see Jacoby, Kelley, & Dywan, 1989; Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009; Schwarz, 2010). And we use this subjective sense of processing, or cognitive f luency, to inform our judgements. Typically when something feels easy to process we think we have seen it before, we think it is trustworthy, frequent, safe, and true (e.g., Tversky & Kahneman, 1973; Begg, Anas, & Farinacci, 1992; Whittlesea, 1993; Song & Schwarz, 2009). And in the context of memory, information that is easily and rapidly recalled feels like it is the result of our own prior experience – for example, a family holiday – and thus part of our autobiography (Jacoby, Kelley et al., 1989).
