Abstract
Studies in humans and rodents have suggested that behavior can at times be “goal-directed”—that is, planned, and purposeful—and at times “habitual”—that is, inflexible and automatically evoked by stimuli. This distinction is central to conceptions of pathological compulsion, as in drug abuse and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Evidence for the distinction has primarily come from outcome devaluation studies, in which the sensitivity of a previously learned behavior to motivational change is used to assay the dominance of habits versus goal-directed actions. However, little is known about how habits and goal-directed control arise. Specifically, in the present study we sought to reveal the trial-by-trial dynamics of instrumental learning that would promote, and protect against, developing habits. In two complementary experiments with independent samples, participants completed a sequential decision task that dissociated two computational-learning mechanisms, model-based and model-free. We then tested for habits by devaluing one of the rewards that had reinforced behavior. In each case, we found that individual differences in model-based learning predicted the participants’ subsequent sensitivity to outcome devaluation, suggesting that an associative mechanism underlies a bias toward habit formation in healthy individuals.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 523-536 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience |
Volume | 15 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 8 2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Behavioral Neuroscience
Keywords
- Devaluation
- Goal-directed
- Habit
- Model-based
- Model-free
- Reinforcement learning