Determining the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of mental and physical tasks.

How do people determine the relative difficulty of mental tasks and physical tasks, and how do they determine the preferred order of such tasks? Is it harder to make such decisions if 1 task is mainly mental and the other is mainly physical than if both tasks are the same kind? To address these questions, we conducted 3 experiments. In experiment 1 we asked participants to judge the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of mental tasks (math problems). In experiment 2 we asked participants to judge the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of physical tasks (moving a bucket back and forth). In experiment 3 we asked participants to judge the relative difficulty and preferred ordering of the same mental and physical tasks as in the first 2 experiments but with 1 of the tasks being mental and the other being physical. We reasoned that if mental task difficulty and physical task difficulty share a common code and if task ordering is systematically related to task difficulty, then judgments in experiment 3 should be as systematic as judgments in Experiments 1 and 2. The results confirmed the prediction and helped extend the notion of common codes for perception and performance to the evaluation of task difficulty and task ordering. A surprising finding was that mental difficulty was implicitly judged to be more important than physical difficulty for the tasks and population studied here. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).