Judging the subjective difficulty of different kinds of tasks

People judge the relative difficulty of different kinds of tasks all the time, yet little is known about how they do so. We asked university students to choose between tasks that taxed perceptual-motor control and memorization to different degrees. Our participants decided whether to carry a box through a wide (81 cm) or narrow (36 cm) gap after memorizing six, seven, or eight digits. The model that maximized the likelihood of observing the choice data treated the extra physical demand of passing through the narrow gap as functionally equivalent to memorizing an extra .55 digits. Substantively, the model suggested that participants judged the difficulty of the compound tasks in terms of separate resources. The approach introduced here may help interrelate different kinds of task difficulty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).