“I can’t focus now, I will study tomorrow” - The link between academic procrastination and resistance to distraction.

Procrastination is a tendency to delay tasks, despite knowing that it might lead to negative consequences. Previous studies have shown that students who frequently procrastinate, present difficulties with maintaining attention during task completion. These problems might be related to decreased resistance to distraction caused by task-irrelevant stimuli appearing in the surrounding environment. In the present study we verified this hypothesis investigating the relationship between procrastination and susceptibility to distraction with the use of behavioral and neurophysiological measures. We recruited high (HP) and low (LP) procrastinating students and asked them to perform an Auditory Visual Distraction task which required participants to respond to visual stimuli and ignore the preceding sounds. Although HP (vs. LP) did not show increased orientation of attention towards distracting sounds, they were still less attentive to task-relevant stimuli. These results indicate that procrastination-related attentional deficits might be linked to other sources of distraction, such as mind-wandering episodes.