Previous research has shown that the subjective expenence of ease or difficulty evoked by memory retrieval operations can play an important role in shaping a range of people's judgments (e.g., Schwarz, 1998). Rather than basing their outputs on the products of the retrieval process, people use experiential cues to guide response generation. Extending work of this kind, the present research investigated the extent to which experiences associated with prior processing operations (e.g., memory encoding and memory retrieval) may affect people's judgments of elapsed time. In Experiments 1-5, participants committed material to memory under encoding conditions that varied in difficulty. Estimates were then taken of the duration and subjective difficulty of the encoding task. As predicted, the subjective ease or difficulty of prior processing operations was shown to guide people's retrospective duration judgments. Specifically, judgments of elapsed time were shorter under difficult processing conditions. In Experiments 6-8, this prediction was further supported when differential demands were placed on the memory retrieval process. That is, when retrieving information was experienced as difficult rather than easy, people judged that less time had elapsed. In Experiment 9, the same experiential effects emerged when immersive virtual environment technology was used to create a more dynamic task environment. These results are considered in the context of contemporary work on retrospective temporal estimation, with particular emphasis on the role of experiential factors in social cognition .