Pre-crastination and path planning: Evidence for cognitive frontloading, a new sibling for cognitive offloading

TL;DR

People tend to speed up task completion by making decisions early, even if it requires more initial effort, a phenomenon called cognitive frontloading.

Contribution

The paper introduces cognitive frontloading as a new concept alongside cognitive offloading, showing how people plan ahead to reduce later cognitive effort.

Findings

Participants spent more time on the first task step to set up subsequent actions, even when unnecessary.

The delay in the first response was due to resolving uncertainty about upcoming actions.

Cognitive frontloading is a general tendency observed across multiple experimental contexts.

Abstract

Pre-crastination is the tendency to hasten task completion, even at the expense of extra effort. Discovered in 2014, it is a widespread phenomenon hypothesized to reduce cognitive effort. We sought to determine whether pre-crastination holds for multi-step path planning. In Experiments 1 and 2, our university-student participants saw all but one of the numbers from 1 to 6 on a computer screen and, when ready, hit the spacebar (Experiment 1) or touched the trackpad (Experiment 2) to reveal the missing number. In both experiments, they then clicked on the targets sequentially as quickly as possible. The time for the first target was longer than for any other target even when noninitial targets were withheld from the preview. A third experiment confirmed that the lengthening of the first response was due to resolution of response uncertainty. The results as a whole confirmed that participants hastened task completion by expending extra effort up front (spending extra time to set up all the responses they would perform). The study extends the reach of pre-crastination and points to the general tendency, now manifest in a growing number of contexts, that, when possible, people complete decision-making about forthcoming response sequences as soon as they can. We refer to this tendency as cognitive frontloading and offer it as a new companion to cognitive offloading, which has been much studied. Both methods reduce memory demands, but in different ways.

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