At What Stage of Process Does Depletion Hurt the Most?

We present two experiments that isolate the point at which depletion negatively influences performance on a self-regulation task. In experiment 1, we found that depleted participants showed greater performance decrements than non-depleted participants to initiate their responses on a self-regulation task. However, once a response was initiated, depleted participants and non depleted participants performed equally. In experiment 2, we replicated the results of experiment 1 and found that as experience in this self-regulation task grows (i.e., as the task becomes habitual), the effect of depletion on response initiation was reduced.

Citation:

Darlene Walsh and Antonia Mantonakis (2009) ,"At What Stage of Process Does Depletion Hurt the Most?", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 772-772.