Does smooth mean simple? The impact of tactile experience on judgments of difficulty

People often associate roughness with difficulty, as a figure of speech. Studies have shown that there is a metaphorical connection between the concept of rough versus smooth feel and the degree of difficulty. However, it has not been determined whether rough and smooth tactile experiences influence judgments of perceived task difficulty from the perspective of physical metaphors. This study used the Stroop experimental paradigm and the metaphorical experimental paradigm to investigate the effects of rough and smooth haptic experiences on difficulty judgments of perceptual tasks in two experiments. (1) There is a psychological reality of “difficult concept-rough touch” and “easy concept-smooth touch,” linking the concept of roughness to the rough/smooth touch metaphor; (2) The physical tactile experience of roughness/smoothness had an effect on perceptual task difficulty judgments. After the experience of roughness, participants tended to judge the difficulty as high, while after the experience of smoothness, participants tended to judge the difficulty as low. Rough and smooth haptics affect perceptual task difficulty judgments, and rough and smooth haptic experiences polarize difficulty judgments in the embodied condition.