Abstract
Precrastination—the tendency to initiate tasks prematurely at the cost of greater effort—has emerged as a robust and counterintuitive phenomenon in human behavior. It has been reliably observed in tasks involving bucket transfers, reach-to-grasp movements, and numerical judgments. However, past studies have used static stimuli in which task-relevant information is fully available at the outset. Here, we investigated whether precrastination extends to decision contexts that require continuous deliberation prior to action selection. Based on the cognitive account that precrastination reflects a strategy to reduce working memory load by “clearing” one’s mental to-do list, we hypothesized that precrastination would increase with task difficulty in a random-dot-motion task. In the single-response condition, participants made one decision about motion direction on each trial. In the double-response condition, participants always made an initial decision about motion direction followed by a second decision that could confirm or revise their initial response. Condition order was counterbalanced across participants. The dot-motion display remained visible throughout each trial. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying motion coherence across four levels: 6.4%, 12.8%, 25.6%, and 51.2%. Results revealed a robust precrastination effect in the double-response condition, with first response times significantly longer than second response times. The magnitude of this effect increased as motion coherence decreased. First response times in the double-response condition were also significantly longer than those in the single-response condition. These findings demonstrate that precrastination generalizes to dynamic contexts and scales with task difficulty, providing additional support that precrastination serves to reduce cognitive load.
