Habits as learning enhancers.

Abstract

Habits are usually associated with both a positive and a negative consequence. The positive consequence is that habits liberate attentional resources and mechanisms (James, 1984, p. 129), thus enabling organisms to perform simultaneous or more complex actions. The negative consequence is that habits become rigid behaviors which persist despite producing harmful outcomes, as in addictions and some neurological disorders. This article proposes that habits also function as learning enhancers. The plausibility of this statement is supported by results from research on word-trained dogs. The use of an animal example has the advantage of parsimony, since it makes possible to show the capacity of habits to facilitate new learning without appealing to highly sophisticated human competences. Evidence has been found that dogs are able to fast map (Kaminski et al., 2004). In studies of language acquisition, the ability to make accurate assumptions about the referent of an unfamiliar word is called fast mapping, a phenomenon that has been observed especially in toddlers (Carey and Bartlett, 1978; Swingley, 2010). This article argues that the training in words forms habits that predispose dogs to establish a new word-object association. The definition of learning as ontogenetic adaptation (De Houwer et al., 2013, p. 633) and the hierarchical view of habit (Dezfouli and Balleine, 2012, 2013) are expounded in Section Learning and Habits. Taking into account these notions, the results of experiments on fast mapping in dogs are presented in Section Fast Mapping in Dogs and Learned Habits, to show that habits work as learning enhancers. Finally, there is a brief section of Concluding Remarks.