BJMB
Brazilian Journal of Motor Behavior
Current Opinion
!
Rosenbaum,
Sturgill, Feghhi
2023
VOL.17
N.1
1 of 2
Pre-crastination: Extra Physical Effort for Mind-Clearing in Reaching, Walking, and
Other Activities
DAVID A. ROSENBAUM
1
| HUNTER B. STURGILL
1
| IMAN FEGHHI
2
1
Department of Psychology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA.
2
Department of Psychology, Wagner College, Staten Island, NY, USA.
Correspondence to:!David A. Rosenbaum, Department of Psychology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
email: david.rosenbaum@ucr.edu
https://doi.org/10.20338/bjmb.v17i1.347
PUBLICATION DATA
Received 16 01 2023
Accepted 23 01 2023
Published 10 04 2023
BACKGROUND: In this opinion, we consider the roles of physical and cognitive effort in
choosing between actions that make different physical and cognitive demands.
VIEW OF THE PAST: In choosing between a less or more demanding physical task, the
cognitive effort of each was not expected to have a large effect.
CURRENT STATE: However, people are willing to expend extra physical effort to clear their
minds (to avoid cognitive effort), a phenomenon called pre-crastination.
FUTURE PERSPECTIVE: Because pre-crastination can lead to premature decisions, a new
priority is to understand the tradeoffs between physical and mental effort.
KEYWORDS: Effort | Pre-crastination | Reaching | Walking
INTRODUCTION
Typically, a finding from the study of motor behavior does not extend to a much wider range of contexts like personality
differences, time management, medical decision-making, jurisprudence, and military strategizing. Anyone hearing it does should be
skeptical. Appreciating this, we nonetheless describe a finding that has attracted unexpectedly wide attention. The finding, encapsulated
in the term pre-crastination, has led us and others to pursue new questions.
Rosenbaum, Gong & Potts
1
sought to infer people’s subjective sense of the combined costs of walking and carrying objects.
The authors asked university students to choose the easier of two tasks: (a) walk a long way and then pick up a beach bucket to carry it a
short distance; or (b) walk a short way and then pick up a different beach bucket to carry it a long distance. The total distance was the
same in both cases. Surprisingly, most participants chose the short walk followed by the long carry rather than the long walk followed by
the short carry.
Nine experiments were conducted to test alternative accounts of this unexpected result. The results led the authors to conclude
that people were willing to expend extra physical effort to reduce mental effort. The mental effort in this case was associated with
inhibiting the reach for the first-encountered bucket. By grabbing the first bucket rather than passing it to take the second, participants
could stop thinking about the bucket pickup task; having the bucket in hand quashed the impulse to pick up the second bucket. Based on
the choice data as well as participants’ comments during debriefing, it was concluded that participants sought to clear their minds of
upcoming task demands and were willing to put in extra physical effort for this purpose. Rosenbaum, Gong & Potts
1
called this tendency
pre-crastination.
Picking up the near bucket and carrying it farther than the other bucket meant that more physical work was done than
necessary. Subsequent studies replicated this tendency and linked it to the felt need to hasten task completion
2
. Consistent with the
mind-clearing hypothesis, it was found that the tendency was even stronger when there were additional memory loads
3,4
.
Analogous effects were found with computerized tasks. In a running-arithmetic task, it was found that subjects slowed mouse
movements before revealing successive operand-operator pairs if they had not completed the preceding sums
5
. In another computerized
task where participants could schedule memory activities and perceptual-motor activities as they wished, they scheduled the activities
that unloaded memory as soon as possible
6
. In a third computerized task
7
, participants made the same judgment twice about a single
stimulus (whether all the numbers in a row of integers ascended). Even though participants could change their minds if they wished
BJMB! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!Current Opinion
Brazilian(Journal(of(Motor(Behavior(
(
Rosenbaum,
Sturgill, Feghhi
2023
VOL.17
N.1
2 of 2
because accuracy only mattered for the second response, they rarely changed their minds. The accuracy of the first response was nearly
as high as the accuracy of the second response, and the first choice reaction times were much longer than the second. The authors
concluded that participants completed their decision-making as soon as possible. Merely acting quickly was not the driver.
Other work extended the work on pre-crastination in new directions. Previously obtained results from animal learning were
interpreted as reflecting the phenomenon
8
. Personality research showed that pre-crastinators were reliably different from, and not just
the opposite of procrastinators, suggesting that the tendency to pre-crastinate is a bona fide individual difference
9
.
Journalists and others have extrapolated from these findings and suggested that pre-crastination may play an important role in
daily life, promoting preparedness, but also leading to premature actions with unfortunate consequences, as in these examples: (1)
answering emails too soon, causing misunderstandings and other problems; (2) submitting manuscripts or proposals before they have
been fully edited; (3) scheduling meetings before all invitees have replied about their availability, requiring rescheduling, among other
difficulties; (4) undergoing medical procedures, including needless surgeries before getting a second opinion; (5) letting down one’s guard
in regard to the Pandemic before that behavior is warranted; (6) convicting or acquitting people in rushes to settle matters; (7) going to
war before that awful action is justified militarily.
Everyone knows that haste makes waste and that quick actions can bring quick rewards. What was less well known before the
work on pre-crastination is that the desire to clear one’s mind can engender special effort and, in some cases, less-than-optimal
decisions. It is noteworthy that this tendency came to light in a study of motor behavior. From the moment pre-crastination was
discovered, it was evident that some sort of tradeoff was being computed between physical effort and mental effort. Understanding the
computations has occupied us recently
10
and is an important new topic of study.
REFERENCES
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2014;25(7):1487-1496. doi:10.1177/0956797614532657
2. Rosenbaum DA, Fournier LR, Levy-Tzedek S, et al. Sooner rather than later: Precrastination rather than procrastination. Current Directions in
Psychological Science. 2019;28(3):229-233. doi:10.1177/0963721419833652
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task ordering. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. 2019;81(2):489-503. doi:10.3758/s13414-018-1633-5
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Psychological Research. April 2022. doi:10.1007/s00426-022-01681-z
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hypothesis. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. 2019;81(7):2517-2525. doi:10.3758/s13414-019-01754-z
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precrastination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2022;151(12):3198-3212. doi:10.1037/xge0001253
8. Wasserman EA. Precrastination: The fierce urgency of now. Learning & Behavior. 2019;47(1):7-28. doi:10.3758/s13420-018-0358-6
9. Gehrig C, Münscher JC, Herzberg PY. How do we deal with our daily tasks? Precrastination and its relationship to personality and other
constructs. Personality and Individual Differences;2023, 201, 111927. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2022.111927
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Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 2022;48(11):1229-1238. doi:10.1037/xhp0001053
Citation: Rosenbaum DA, Sturgill HB, Feghhi I. (2023).!Pre-crastination: Extra Physical Effort for Mind-Clearing in Reaching, Walking, and Other Activities. Brazilian
Journal of Motor Behavior, 17(1):1-2.
Editor-in-chief: Dr Fabio Augusto Barbieri - São Paulo State University (UNESP), Bauru, SP, Brazil. !
Associate editors: Dr José Angelo Barela - São Paulo State University (UNESP), Rio Claro, SP, Brazil; Dr Natalia Madalena Rinaldi - Federal University of Espírito Santo
(UFES), Vitória, ES, Brazil; Dr Renato de Moraes University of São Paulo (USP), Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil.!
Copyright:© 2022 Rosenbaum, Sturgill and Feghhi and BJMB. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source
are credited.
Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
DOI:!https://doi.org/10.20338/bjmb.!v17i1.347