Department of Clinical Psychology.
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2018 Jul;147(7):1043-1065. doi: 10.1037/xge0000402.
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. (PsycINFO Database Record
习惯是通过实践、常规和重复而形成的重复性行为。我们重复一个动作的次数越多，习惯就变得越强烈。行为和临床神经科学家对这个话题越来越感兴趣，因为习惯可能会导致人类行为的适应不良方面，例如精神病学中的强迫行为。许多研究表明，通过简单地过度训练刺激-反应行为，原本健康的大鼠可以产生习惯。然而，尽管人们对这个话题及其在精神病学中的应用越来越感兴趣，但在人类中却缺乏类似的研究。只有一项研究发表在人类身上，表明广泛的训练对习惯表达的影响。在这里，我们报告了五次未能证明过度训练工具行为会导致人类产生不灵活习惯的尝试，使用了之前发表的四种结果贬值范式的变体。在两种回避学习任务、一种奖赏性动作失误任务中，以及在两次独立尝试复制原始演示中，广泛的训练并没有导致更大的习惯。这一发现表明，这些结果贬值程序在人类中可能对刺激-反应训练的持续时间不敏感，这对精神病患者群体中的先前工作有影响。具体来说，它与以下观点一致，即强迫个体中结果贬值的失败反映了目标导向控制的功能障碍，而不是过度活跃的习惯学习。我们讨论了为什么习惯很难在健康的人类中通过实验诱导，以及这对健康和障碍人群的未来研究的影响。
