UC Riverside Undergraduate Research Journal

Pacing is a critical mechanism for sustaining performance. When making decisions, people must consider the demands of a task to pace themselves accordingly. Compared to sports literature, this project looks at pacing and how it manifests in an everyday work environment - an area of research that is surprisingly little studied. The team sought to study pacing, by comparing performance over successively longer distances, like sprints compared to marathons. In two preliminary experiments, undergraduate students pressed the enter key some varying number of times, N = [8 16 32 64]. Additionally, students were told to exceed N just as runners run through the finish line of a race. The main question was if participants would tap slower when N was large compared to when N was small, just like runners. Surprisingly, participants did not change their performance based on N and participants slowed dramatically as they approached N, despite being instructed not to. Our main method of measurement was the mean interresponse interval (IRI) which is the average elapsed time between consecutive taps. We changed the count feedback between separate experiments and no change has extinguished the slowing effect. Results from two experiments show premature slowing suggesting that as people approach the end of a task, they slow their performance. This new phenomenon has implications for everyone who does multiple tasks in a day. Future work will explore whether changing the tap rate or removing the IRI feedback will affect the premature slowing phenomenon.