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.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13415-015-0347-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Studies in humans and rodents have suggested that behavior can at times be Bgoal-directed^—that is, planned, and purposeful—and at times Bhabitual^—that is, inflexible and automatically evoked by stimuli
To assess whether model-based or model-free learning strategies were associated with the formation of devaluationinsensitive habits, we tested for the presence of (1) Reward × Devaluation and (2) Reward × Transition × Devaluation interactions
We found evidence in support of the latter hypothesis, such that participants who were more model-based during training showed larger goal-directed sensitivity to devaluation in the habit test, (β = 0.1, standard error [SE] = 0.03, p = .003; see Table 1 and Fig. 3)
Summary
Studies in humans and rodents have suggested that behavior can at times be Bgoal-directed^—that is, planned, and purposeful—and at times Bhabitual^—that is, inflexible and automatically evoked by stimuli. An accumulation of evidence has suggested that excessive habit learning is central to disorders of compulsivity, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; Gillan & Robbins, 2014) and substance dependence (Dickinson, Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci (2015) 15:523–536 The existence of these two systems, and assays of their relative control over behavior in different circumstances or populations, are largely inferred from post-training outcome devaluation procedures (Adams & Dickinson, 1981), in which the value of a desirable outcome is reduced—for example, through selective satiety (Balleine & Dickinson, 1998; Tricomi, Balleine, & O’Doherty, 2009) or taste aversion (Adams & Dickinson, 1981). We sought to connect goaldirected and habitual behaviors to learning mechanisms that have been hypothesized to produce them
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