People regularly use active touch to perform daily life tasks. Imagine choosing a comfortable pillow and how you would explore its softness. It is known that people tune their exploratory behavior to get the most relevant information. In the exploration process, also prior information is used, which is available before we touch an object. For softness perception, object indentation plays a crucial role; indentation forces were higher, when people implicitly expected to explore harder as compared to softer objects. This force-tuning improved perception, and was observed when trials of the same softness level (hard or soft) were presented in longer blocks. However, it was not reported for predictable patterns in that hard and soft stimuli alternate in every or every other trial. Here, we investigated when and how implicit prior information about the softness level becomes accessible for successful force-tuning in softness discrimination. Participants were presented with hard and soft stimulus pairs in sequences of the length of 2, 4 or 6 trials. In predictable conditions, same-length sequences of hard and soft trials alternated constantly. In unpredictable conditions, we presented sequences of lengths 2, 4 and 6 randomly. We analyzed initial peak indentation forces. Participants applied higher forces to harder stimuli in the predictable condition in longer sequences (4 and 6) as compared to the unpredictable condition and shorter sequences of 2. We interpret the findings in terms of an anticipatory and incremental mechanism of force-tuning, which needs to be triggered by an initial predictable stimulus.