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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 7, 2026

Errors as a Means of Reducing Impulsive Food Choice
07:07

Errors as a Means of Reducing Impulsive Food Choice

Published on: June 5, 2016

Optimal habits can develop spontaneously through sensitivity to local cost.

Theresa M Desrochers1, Dezhe Z Jin, Noah D Goodman

  • 1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|October 27, 2010
PubMed
Summary

Reinforcement learning (RL) explains how animals form habits. This study shows RL accounts for complex, sequential behaviors in monkeys, suggesting it underlies habit formation and repetitive disorders.

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Studying Habituation in Stentor coeruleus
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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Animal Behavior
  • Computational Neuroscience

Background:

  • Habits and rituals are universal across species, aiding sequential behavior without cognitive load.
  • Neural circuits for habits are vulnerable to addiction and neuropsychiatric disorders.
  • Reinforcement learning (RL) is theorized to drive optimal habit formation.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test if RL can explain habitual action sequences in complex scenarios.
  • To investigate habit emergence without simple stimulus-response links.
  • To explore RL's role in situations with many response options.

Main Methods:

  • Exposed naïve macaque monkeys to a free saccade scan task with high uncertainty.
  • Monitored the development of stereotypical saccade sequence patterns over months.
  • Analyzed trial-by-trial behavior and performed RL simulations.

Main Results:

  • Monkeys spontaneously developed and refined saccade sequence patterns.
  • Behavioral changes persisted long after reward and cost reached asymptote.
  • RL simulations incorporating reduced cost accurately reproduced monkey behavior.

Conclusions:

  • RL algorithms can account for the emergence of complex habitual action sequences.
  • Habit formation, including in clinical disorders, may follow RL principles.
  • These findings highlight local explore/exploit tradeoffs in habit emergence.