Investigating the effect of cognitive effort on procrastination and its mechanism

Abstract

This thesis studied the impact of cognitive effort on procrastination through the development of a novel mental arithmetic task. The task was explicitly designed to examine procrastination behavior in immediate situations that demand putting in varying cognitive effort. The findings revealed that higher levels of cognitive effort corresponded with increased procrastination behaviors. Conversely, when the cognitive effort required for the same trial level was reduced, the rate of procrastination also decreased. Additionally, the cognitive effort was modeled as an exponential function within a procrastination model, and its influence on the computational model of procrastination was analyzed.