Learning

Do we form habits from repetition or just our last action?

Giesen CG, Schmidt JR, Rothermund K · Frontiers in psychology · 2019

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

Habitual actions are driven by remembering our very last action in a situation, rather than the total number of times we have practiced it.

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How this study connects

Role on claims

Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.

SupportsLearningconcept
The gradual-strengthening interpretation did not survive controlling for the last trial.
An apparent frequency effect can be a single-episode retrieval effect. Participants responded faster to high-frequency colour-word pairs by 6 ms and 9 ms across two studies, but the effect disappeared entirely once what they did on the most recent encounter with that word was controlled.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
SupportsContingency Learningconcept
What appears to be habit acquisition driven by repeated contingency pairings can instead be fully explained by whether an individual repeats their exact physical action from the most recent trial.
Evidence for the claim as stated.

Study at a glance

Design: Human experiment — Two experiments testing recency-based episodic S–R retrieval
N: Experiment 1 n = 30 FSU Jena students; Experiment 2 n = 40
Population: Native German-speaking university students
Outcome: Response times explained by retrieval of the most recent stimulus–response episode

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Do we form habits from repetition or just our last action?

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30 participants in the first experiment

Thirty native German-speaking FSU Jena students (18 female; M age = 23.03 years; range: 18–30 years) took part in the experiment.

4 word stimuli used in the experiments

Stimuli were the four neutral monosyllabic German adjectives “warm” (“warm”), “klein” (“small”), “ganz” (“whole”) and “fast” (“almost”).

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Key findings

Both studies revealed that participants learned the color-word pairings, reacting faster to high-frequency pairs by 6 ms in the first study and by 9 ms in the second study. Crucially, when the researchers controlled for what participants did during their most recent encounter with a word, this learning effect disappeared entirely. Speed was instead driven by whether participants repeated their exact previous physical response, a memory effect that remained active when the word was separated by a distance of 5 to 6 trials in the first study, and 6 to 7 trials in the second study.

Methodology

The researchers conducted a pair of experiments with college students to test why habits form. In the first study, 30 participants quickly identified the text colors of 4 different words. Some word-color pairings appeared more often than others, establishing a skewed contingency ratio. In the second study, 40 participants performed a similar task with an even stronger contingency ratio. The researchers measured if performance was driven by overall practice or by the exact action performed on the most recent trial.

Limitations

This study relied on speeded button-pressing tasks rather than the free-choice daily behaviors often examined in animal research, which limits how well these findings apply to real-world habits. Furthermore, the experiments did not use external rewards or punishments, meaning the design cannot show how reward-based learning interacts with memory-based retrieval. Finally, the research used a specific sample of young university students, which may not represent the general population.

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