Topic: habits

Humans tend to repeat past actions, with habits as extreme case. With each execution of an action this repetition bias increases the probability to repeat this action. However, there is a lack of experiments investigating repetition bias.To test for the presence of a repetition bias, we developed a new sequential decision-making task (see Figure). For this task, participants had to collect points with four moves and meet a trial-specific goal as closely as possible. To ensure frequent repetition of at least one sequence of actions, we informed participants about a default action sequence that

Habits and goal-directed behaviour are often viewed as opposite extremes in the spectrum of human behaviour. However, some theoretical accounts hypothesize that the initiation of habits may underlie goal-directed control, as habits often contribute to the achievement of specific goals. Here, we test this hypothesis by using a task that concurrently measures habitual and goal-directed behaviour (Frölich et al., Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16 (2023)), see Figure. In this task, participants implicitly learn a hidden repeating action sequence over two days while instructed to maximize their perform