Parallel effects of retrieval ease on attributions about the past and the future

The present study explored the role of task difficulty in judgments about the past and the future. Participants recalled events from childhood and imagined future events. The difficulty of the task was manipulated by asking participants to generate either four or twelve events. Participants then rated how well they could generally remember events from their childhood or how well planned their futures were. Consistent with past research (e.g., Winkielman, Schwarz, & Belli, 1998), participants in the difficult recall group rated their childhood memories as less complete than participants in the easy recall group. A parallel effect was found in participants' judgments of their futures. Participants who were asked to imagine twelve future events rated their future plans as less complete than those who imagined four events. Moreover, there was a negative correlation between the rated difficulty of the task and the degree to which participants found their memories and plans to be complete. We also examined the valence of the generated events. These results showed a strong positivity bias for both types of judgments, and the bias was particularly strong when thinking of future events. The results suggest that similar attributional processes mediate beliefs about the past and the future.