Habits Versus Rewards
Normally we think of habits as close to unbreakable, but here too the experiments tell us something important.
They tell us something about our behavior in a situation where we have been trained for a certain action. The participants in our experiments spent a lot of time learning how to connect a single box with a shift of attention to a particular corner of the screen.
Training the attention shifts should make them into habits. But when they were presented with four competing actions that they had a short time to decide on, participants chose the reward over the habitual behavior.
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New research suggests our brains prioritize actions based on rewards, not habits, challenging the idea that tech simply “steals” attention.
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