Precrastination and individual differences in working memory capacity

Nisha Raghunath

When ordering tasks, people tend to first perform the task that can be started or completed sooner (versus later) even if this choice requires more physical effort (precrastination). Recent evidence from object transport tasks indicate that precrastination is sensitive to conserving cognitive effort and is not observed if it increases cognitive effort. It was proposed that precrastination is an automatic behavior triggered by object affordances that offloads prospective or working memory demands, and that precrastination must be overridden in tasks where it is cognitively suboptimal. Interestingly, when precrastination was cognitively suboptimal, some participants never precrastinated and others always precrastinated suggesting that individual differences may explain these suboptimal choices. We examined whether differences in working memory capacity account for these suboptimal choices. Participants, while engaged in a secondary digit memory task, retrieved two cups of water located at different distances down a corridor in the order of their choosing and returned them both together to their start position without spilling. Precrastination was not observed; participants tended to select the far cup first more frequently when the ratio of water (full versus half full) in the close to far cup increased, though a subset of participants always selected the close cup first. Also, first cup choice was not influenced by individual differences in working memory capacity, tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking, or tendency to procrastinate. However, a negative correlation between participants' mean precrastination rates and average digit recall accuracy was found, indicating that some did not have enough cognitive resources to allocate attention to both tasks concurrently, and acted on an automatic tendency to precrastinate. Subjective reports support this idea of automatic behavior; those who always precrastinated often reported that they did not think about their actions while those who did not precrastinate reported doing so to be more efficient.

Precrastination and individual differences in working memory capacity

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