Pre-Crastination Effects in a Prospective Memory Task

Publication Date

4-6-2018

Document Type

Poster

Department

Psychology

Mentor

Dawn McBride

Mentor Department

Psychology

Abstract

The precrastination effect is the finding that individuals complete actions earlier to "get it out of the way" (Rosenbaum, Gong, & Potts, 2014). In the current study, we tested precrastination with a prospective memory (PM) paradigm to determine if this phenomenon generalizes to PM tasks that can be completed at a time chosen by the participant. Based on Rosenbaum et al.'s (2014) results that precrastination decreased when the task to be completed was more effortful, we investigated whether difficulty of the PM task affects when participants choose to complete the task. Our results indicated that the more difficult the PM task, the later participants chose to complete the task in the trial sequence. Reaction times (RTs) in completing the ongoing task were not influenced by participants' choice of when to complete the PM task or the PM task difficulty level, but ongoing RTs decreased after completion of the PM task.

Comments

VonderHaar-graduate

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