The neural basis underlying procrastination: a large-scale study of brain networks

Abstract

Procrastination is a type of irrational behavior during which an individual voluntarily delays the execution of a task despite perceiving such behavior as harmful. Procrastination adversely affects people’s emotions, academic performances, and social achievements; it reduces their subjective well-being, and worse, their physical and mental health. The brain systems that regulate procrastination are still largely undetermined; previous studies have only explored the relationships between procrastination and regional brain activities and cerebral functional connections. Because procrastination involves complex psychological motivations that are dependent on elements such as task value representation, cognitive control, and the approach-avoidance conflict, some limitations to exploring the neural basis of procrastination using univariate and regional brain activities may exist. Therefore, this study used graph-theoretic analysis to investigate the connectivity patterns of large-scale brain networks underlying procrastination. We first defined the 264 regions of interest (ROIs) introduced by Power et al. (2011) as nodes of the network, and then reconstructed the ten intrinsic large-scale brain networks using graph-theoretic analysis. The results showed that the constructed brain network had better network topology attributes, such as a higher local and global efficiency. The strength of functional connectivity within each of these ten brain networks and that between them was then calculated using Pearson’s correlation. Finally, the association between procrastination and the functional network connectivity of brain networks was examined. We found that procrastination was negatively associated with the functional connectivity within the cingulo-opercular network (CON), whereas it was positively associated with the functional connectivity within the subcortical network (SCN). We also found a positive correlation between procrastination and the functional connectivity between the salience network (SAN) and the SCN. These results suggest that the functional network connectivity within the CON and the SCN, as well as that between the SAN and the SCN may be the neural basis underlying procrastination, which highlights the critical role of cognitive control and impulsive value representation in procrastination.