Abstract
Procrastination is a prevalent problematic behavior that brings serious consequences to individuals who suffer from it. Although this phenomenon has received increasing attention from researchers, the underpinning neural substrates of it is poorly studied. To examine the neural bases subserving procrastination, the present study employed resting-state fMRI. The main results were as follows: (1) the behavioral procrastination was positively correlated with the regional activity of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the parahippocampal cortex (PHC), while negatively correlated with that of the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC). (2) The aPFC-seed connectivity with the anterior medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex was positively associated with procrastination. (3) The connectivity between vmPFC and several other regions, such as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, the bilateral inferior prefrontal cortex showed a negative association with procrastination. These results suggested that procrastination could be attributed to, on the one hand, hyper-activity of the default mode network (DMN) that overrides the prefrontal control signal; while on the other hand, the failure of top-down control exerted by the aPFC on the DMN. Therefore, the present study unravels the biomarkers of procrastination and provides treatment targets for procrastination prevention.
Highlights
It is important for people to initiate and adapt information processing through temporal context
The regions whose activity showing positive correlations with the General Procrastination Scale (GPS) scores were the parahippocampal cortex (PHC) (x =−36, y =−18, z =−30) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (x = 9, y = 42, z =−24). While those negatively correlated with procrastination were the anterior prefrontal cortex (x = 39, y = 48, z = 6) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) (x = 6, y =−57, z = 15)
The partial correlation analyses revealed that the zALFF values in the anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC) negatively correlated with the GPS scores, r =−0.330, p < 0.001, df = 128, two-tailed
Summary
It is important for people to initiate and adapt information processing through temporal context Deficits in this ability would make individuals put off scheduled things until deadline, and would further affect one’s daily life, working business[1] or even public policy[2]. One study suggests that procrastination is correlated with bad emotional states[20], and individuals with procrastination tend to focus on short-term mood repair, showing a temporal disjunction between the present and future selves[21,22] Based on these findings, we hypothesized that procrastination is attributed to the operations of the prefrontal cortex, www.nature.com/scientificreports/. To further test the hypothesis that procrastination could be attributed to brain interactions, we estimated the functional connectivity (FC) patterns and correlated them with the behavioral procrastination
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