Abstract
This study tested the hypothesis that paradoxical effects of ease of retrieval can be attributed to changes in retrieval strategy prompted by difficulty experienced. Participants in the expectancy condition were presented expectations about personality traits of others. Subsequently, all participants were presented with a list of others’ behaviors, which included items congruent and incongruent with expectations. Associative memory links were assumed to form between items in the expectancy condition. Participants in Experiment 1 were requested to recall one (easy) or four (difficult) congruent items. Participants in Experiment 2 recalled two congruent items and inputted them with fluently (easy) or disfluently (difficult) perceived color fonts. Results indicated that, when participants experienced difficulty in recall in the expectancy condition, their judgments were opposite to the recalled contents. These effects were mediated by spontaneous recall of incongruent items. This mediational pattern was not observed in the no-expectancy condition. The results suggest that difficulty facilitates an exhaustive item search in associative memory and judgments are based on spontaneously recalled information during this search process.
