University Honors

Thinking about, planning for, and completing tasks is a compulsory aspect of everyday life. A less apparent, and far less understood, aspect of our daily lives is the joint influences of thinking about future and present task demands. For instance, imagine you are performing a routine task like getting ready for school, then suddenly you recall your upcoming midterm. In a fluster, preoccupied by thoughts about the midterm, you leave home without brushing your teeth. In this case, realizing the upcoming task (your midterm) interfered with completing a task at hand (brushing your teeth). The present study tests whether knowledge about an upcoming task will interfere with performance on a preceding task. It addresses current and future task interference in terms of verbal fluency (or word generation). It suggests that joint task influences are mediated by pre-castination: the tendency to start subgoals as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra effort. Furthermore, this study seeks to expand pre-crastination to the verbal domain and offers a novel experimental design for verbal fluency. The implications of joint task interference cannot be overstated, given the busyness of the modern-day schedule.