How often did I do it? Experienced ease of retrieval and

The present research investigates the role of experienced ease of retrieval in frequency estimates of personally performed past behavior. Based on the logic that it is more dicult to remember more than a few dierent personal instances of past bicycle use, we speculated that the experienced ease (or diculty) associated with this task rather than the content of recall guides subsequent frequency estimates of past bicycle use. Furthermore, to test whether the possible influence of the experienced ease of recall can be attenuated, we investigated the ef-fects of the number of recalled examples on the frequency estimates under low and high ac-curacy motivation conditions. Results of two experiments showed that participants ’ frequency estimates were lower after they had generated 8 rather than 3 examples. However, this eect did not emerge when participants were motivated to be accurate in their estimates. Ó 199