Procrastination is the tendency to delay initiating or completing tasks. Rosenbaum et al. (Psychological Science, May 8, 2014) recently documented the opposite of procrastination: pre-crastination, the tendency to begin or to finish tasks as soon as possible. We devised a simple two-alternative forced-choice task, in which pigeons could choose to switch response location either sooner or later in a sequence of actions eventuating in food reward. Even though there was no economic advantage for doing so, pigeons chose to switch response location sooner rather than later in the sequence, showing pre-crastination to be quite general. Pre-crastination thus joins other anticipatory learning phenomena in challenging rational or optimal accounts of behavioral adaptation.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 90. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 13 August 2025.
All research outputs
#601,322
of 34,614,958 outputs
Outputs from Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
#96
of 2,508 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#5,216
of 306,564 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
#1
of 44 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,614,958 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 98th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 2,508 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 16.4. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 96% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 306,564 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 44 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 97% of its contemporaries.
