Shifting the balance between goals and habits: Five failures in experimental habit induction.

Abstract

Habits are repetitive behaviors that become ingrained with practice, routine, and repetition. The more we repeat an action, the stronger our habits become. Behavioral and clinical neuroscientists have become increasingly interested in this topic because habits may contribute to aspects of maladaptive human behavior, such as compulsive behavior in psychiatry. Numerous studies have demonstrated that habits can be induced in otherwise healthy rats by simply overtraining stimulus–response behaviors. However, despite growing interest in this topic and its application to psychiatry, a similar body of work in humans is absent. Only a single study has been published in humans that shows the effect of extensive training on habit expression. Here, we report five failed attempts to demonstrate that overtraining instrumental behavior leads to the development of inflexible habits in humans, using variants of four previously published outcome devaluation paradigms. Extensive training did not lead to greater habits in two versions of an avoidance learning task, in an appetitive slips-of-action task, or in two independent attempts to replicate the original demonstration. The finding that these outcome devaluation procedures may be insensitive to duration of stimulus-response training in humans has implications for prior work in psychiatric populations. Specifically, it converges with the suggestion that the failures in outcome devaluation in compulsive individuals reflect dysfunction in goal-directed control, rather than overactive habit learning. We discuss why habits are difficult to experimentally induce in healthy humans, and the implications of this for future research in healthy and disordered populations.

Hippocampal BDNF regulates a shift from flexible, goal‐directed to habit memory system function following cocaine abstinence

“…Whether maladaptive behaviors characteristic of drug abuse are supported by enhancements in habit memory systems, impairments in goal-directed memory systems or a combination of both remains poorly understood (de Wit et al, 2018;Ersche et al, 2016;Everitt & Robbins, 2005;Robbins et al, 2008).…”

Action-Outcome Knowledge Dissociates From Behavior in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Following Contingency Degradation

“…This manipulation might conceivably have diluted the effect of repetition owing to the different number of instrumental contingencies experienced before the relevant critical test across subjects. Furthermore, the short task duration may have limited the possibility of detecting training effects, in line with evidence that limited overtraining in instrumental behaviors often fails to produce habit learning (46) .…”

Addiction is driven by excessive goal-directed drug choice under negative affect: translational critique of habit and compulsion theory

“…Three studies have demonstrated that the drug-seeking response is initially goal-directed but then becomes habitual with extended training [69][70][71]. However, because food seeking also transitions from goal-directed to habitual control with training in animals [187] (not replicated in humans [188]), these findings do not inform us about the unique habit forming potential of drug seeking.…”