Abstract
Executive functioning (EF) shapes how we navigate everyday life and approach difficult tasks. Therefore, it is important to understand the factors that benefit or disrupt EF. One such factor is time pressure, the sense of having insufficient time to perform an action. Studies show that time limits reliably impair EF. However, little is known about how the perception of time pressure (PTP) alone, in the absence of real time limits, impacts cognitive processes like EF. Using a Flanker task to index the EF inhibition, I induced PTP by manipulating the duration of inter-trial intervals (ITIs) across the experiment. Specifically, I shortened ITIs to increase PTP and lengthened ITIs to decrease PTP. I found that PTP strongly impacted task performance, with increasing PTP fomenting distress and impairing inhibitory control. Decreasing PTP reversed these effects. In conflict with the Attentional Control Theory (Eysenck et al. 2007), baseline test anxiety did not affect performance effectiveness or performance efficiency. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the shared aspects of stress and negative affect predicted changes in inhibition following increasing, but not decreasing, PTP. These findings suggest that PTP is an effective manipulation for studying distress and show that EF is sensitive to changes in PTP.