Procrastination vs. cognitive control

What we researched:

• The effect of procrastination levels on decreased preparatory activation and cognitive control among students.

How we did it:

• To measure the level of procrastination, the researchers used the Polish version of the Aitken Procrastination Inventory (API: Aitken, 1982), which consists of 19 items with a 5-point Likert scale response format. Students (N = 1968) from different universities and colleges in Poznań completed the API. Of this sample, based on the standard deviation of the mean result in API, the research team selected 80 participants for high and 80 for low procrastination groups. Later, the researchers excluded participants with psychiatric or neurological disorders as well as uncorrected vision, so the final sample consisted of 139 participants.

Why is it important:

• Because the study has shown that people exhibiting a high procrastination level might present lower proactive control engagement compared to those with a low procrastination level.

Apart from lower values of some of the proactive control indices, high procrastinators also showed slower reactions throughout the task, which might result from inattention to cues and decreased preparatory activation before probe presentation.

Jarosław Michałowski, Ph.D./Associate Professor

Co-author of the study, Head of the Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience