The Get Ready Mind‐Set: How Gearing Up for Later Impacts Effort Allocation Now (original) (raw)

This research investigates how anticipations of future task demands influence current effort allocation by exploring the "get ready mind-set." The findings reveal that expecting difficult future tasks mobilizes cognitive resources, inadvertently leading to increased effort on unrelated current tasks, especially when individuals struggle to separate those tasks. The study challenges the conventional view that task anticipation conserves resources, highlighting that the nature of tasks affects cognitive resource management.