Before people decide between options, such as different hotels, when planning a vacation, they tend to systematically distort sequentially presented information about the options in the direction of their emerging preferences. This distortion effect leads to a more coherent representation of information and thereby helps people experience the decision situation as less complex than it is. In a study with 260 participants, we compare how participants distort information that is currently shown versus that has been shown before. Some distortion effects are similar: Information about the preferred option is evaluated more positively than information about the non-preferred option, independently of whether the information is present or has been presented before. Some effects are, however, dissimilar: Information that is incongruent with the current preference (i.e., negative information about the preferred option and positive information about the non-preferred option) is more strongly distorted in retrospect. In contrast, information congruent with the current preference (i.e., positive information about the preferred option and negative information about the non-preferred option) is distorted more strongly when present. We discuss how a coherence-based network model of information distortion can explain these effects.