BJMB! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !!!!!!!Current Opinion
Brazilian(Journal(of(Motor(Behavior(
(
Rosenbaum,
Sturgill, Feghhi
https://doi.org/10.20338/bjmb.v17i1.316
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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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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Psychology: General. 2002;131(2):206-219. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.131.2.206
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hypothesis. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. 2019;81(7):2517-2525. doi:10.3758/s13414-019-01754-z
7. Rosenbaum DA, Sturgill HB, Feghhi I. Think then act, or act then think? Double-response reaction times shed light on decision dynamics in
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