Stimulus control of habits: Evidence for both stimulus specificity and devaluation insensitivity in a dual‐response task
A two-lever, two-reward box shows when stimulus control becomes a habit that ignores empty pay-offs.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Turner et al. (2024) built a new two-lever box for rats. One lever gave food. The other gave water. Lights told the rat which lever would pay off.
After weeks of practice, the team removed the food. Rats that kept pressing the food lever even though it no longer delivered showed habit. Rats that stopped showed goal control.
What they found
Rats kept pressing the empty lever, but only when the same light was on. When the light changed, they switched to the water lever. The habit was both stimulus-bound and blind to the missing reward.
The dual-response task cleanly split goal-directed from habitual control in one box.
How this fits with other research
Labrecque et al. (2024) saw the same pattern in humans. After many trials, people kept choosing the practiced key even when told it no longer paid. Repetition, not species, drives the habit.
Zeiler (1968) also trained rats to hold or release a bar depending on the same light. Turner updates that idea by adding two rewards and an empty-outcome test to spot the habit.
Lattal (1984) argued we need tasks that show associative structure. The dual-response box answers that call by letting us watch habits form and freeze in real time.
Why it matters
You now have a lab model that tells you, trial by trial, when a skill flips from flexible to automatic. Use it to test how many practice trials turn a new button press or vocal request into a durable habit. Then decide whether to keep reinforcing or to start thinning the schedule before the behavior becomes too stubborn to change.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Goal‐directed and habitual actions are clearly defined by their associative relations. Whereas goal‐directed control can be confirmed via tests of outcome devaluation and contingency‐degradation sensitivity, a comparable criterion for positively detecting habits has not been established. To confirm habitual responding, a test of control by the stimulus–response association is required while also ruling out goal‐directed control. Here we describe an approach to developing such a test in rats using two discriminative stimuli that set the occasion for two different responses that then earn the same outcome. Performance was insensitive to outcome devaluation and showed stimulus–response specificity, indicative of stimulus‐controlled behavior. The reliance of stimulus–response associations was further supported by a lack of sensitivity during the single extinction test session used here. These results demonstrate that two concurrently trained responses can come under habitual control when they share a common outcome. By reducing the ability of one stimulus to signal its corresponding response–outcome association, we found evidence for goal‐directed control that can be dissociated from habits. Overall, these experiments provide evidence that tests assessing specific stimulus–response associations can be used to investigate habits.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2024 · doi:10.1002/jeab.898