Advances in the Science of Habits 2015

Provost Professor of Psychology and Business
Vice Dean for Social Sciences
University of Southern California
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Areas of Interest:  My research addresses questions of how habits form and change, how people are influenced by social groups, and what are the bases for gender differences in social behavior.

Welcome and Introductions

Professor
Cognitive Psychology
Colorado State University

Areas of Interest:  Cognitive Neuroscience, learning and memory, high-level visual perception

Presentation title:  “What are habits, what do they have to do with the basal ganglia, and why does it matter?”

Professor
College of Life Sciences and Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles

Areas of Interest:  The focus of our lab is the study of the neural bases of memory. We use a number of different approaches, including neuroimaging and testing neuropsychological patients to describe functional differences between memory systems and the brain regions that support different memory processes.

Presentation Title:  “Corticostriatal loops for habits and actions”

Associate Professor, Department of Clinical Psychology
University of Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Areas of Interest:  Her interests lie at the interface between associative learning theory, behavioural neuroscience, and clinical psychology. The overarching idea behind her research is that fundamental mechanisms of learning and motivation lie at the basis of decision-making and can give rise to adaptive as well as maladaptive behaviour. Conventional experimental paradigms that require participants to respond according to instructed stimulus-response mappings are not suitable for the study of incentive modulation of goal-directed action. To overcome this limitation, she develops experimental paradigms that are direct translations from animal models. She combines behavioural analyses with a neurobiological approach, using mainly functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to investigate the neural underpinnings of actions and habits. To investigate whether disruptions of fundamental learning and motivational mechanisms play a role in complex, clinical conditions, she currently collaborate with clinical experts in the setting of, for example: obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction and obesity.

Presentation Title:  “Insights into habit from experimental outcome-devaluation studies”

Board of Trustee Distinguished Professor of Psychology

Post Doc, Department of Psychology
University of Southern California
Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Areas of Interest:  I study behavior change with a focus on habits. Current projects examine how misunderstanding the causes of our habits can lead to failed self-change attempts, and a consumer psychology study investigates the impact of habits on product choice, use, and switching to alternative products.

Presentation Title:  “Sticky habits: How associations and inferences impede change”

Postdoctoral Researcher
Center for Neural Science
New York University

Areas of Interest:  decision-making, reinforcement learning, cognitive neuroscience

Presentation Title:  “Probing the Correspondence between Executive Function and Reinforcement Learning”

Founder and Managing Partner
Catalyst Behavioral Sciences
Miami Florida

Areas of Interest:  habit, behavior change, consumer behavior, trademark litigation

Presentation Title:  “Habits in the wild: Applications of habit thinking in health and consumer consulting”

Professor of Psychology
California Institute of Technology

Areas of Interest:  My main research interests are to develop an understanding of the brain systems involved in making decisions under uncertainty, representing the value of stimuli in the world, learning to predict future rewards, and in the flexible control of behavior to obtain reward. This is achieved through a combination of functional neuroimaging (fMRI) with computational models of learning and decision making. This approach enables a much more powerful form of inference than is traditionally made in functional imaging studies, identifying regions with a response profile consistent with a specific computational process rather than merely reporting the “activation” of a brain region in that task. Other interests include the functional neuroanatomy of human emotions, and neural structures involved in social cognition.

Presentation Title:  “The role of ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in arbitration of model-based and model-free reinforcement-learning: from fMRI to causal manipulations”

Assistant Professor of Psychology and Brain Sciences
Dartmouth

Areas of Interest:  I conduct research on how the brain works to generate reward, motivation, actions, and habits. My work incorporates techniques to record neural activity, modulate neuronal activity at sub-second timescales, study brain chemistry, and map brain connections. The research is relevant to understanding disorders of reward and action, like addiction, Parkinson’s disease, and obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders.

Presentation Title:  “Real Time Measurement and Manipulation of Habits in the Rodent Brain”

Faculty
Applied Social Psychology
University of Zurich

Areas of Interest:  Our research is focused on questions relevant in health psychology, and in particular, on the application of health psychology in daily life. For this reason, our research interests lie in the change of health-related behaviour (e.g. the increase of physical activity, the cutting back of unhealthy snacking habits, and the cessation of smoking), as well as stress and disease management (e.g. in people with multiple illnesses). The research into individual self-regulation plays an equally important role as the research into social exchange processes. For this reason, we have several research projects focusing on dyads (e.g., couples), in order to be able to not only examine individual self-regulation but to more precisely consider the perspectives of both partners in their interaction and their relation to our topics of interest. Another important element of our research is the application and development of research methods which allows research in longitudinal designs, within and between persons, in a natural environment. This includes, for example, experience sampling, diary entries, and intervention studies in everyday life (ecological momentary interventions).

Presentation title:  “Receiving emotional social support helps to engage in self-set exercise-goals”

Faculty
Imperial College London

Areas of Interest:Applied Psychology, Health Psychology, Behavioural Science

Presentation Title:  “The role of perceived rewards in habit-formation: the example of vitamin adherence”

Associate Professor
School of Psychology and Speech Pathology
Curtin University

Areas of Interest:  My research interests include social cognition models in predicting and intervening to improve health, particularly food-related behaviours, physical health and addiction.

Presentation Title:  “The Daily Rate of Habit Formation is Not Dependent on Number of Assessments”

Professor, Department of Psychology
University of Essex
United Kingdom

Areas of Interest:  Attitudes; Intention-behaviour relation; Self-regulation; Social psychology of volition and volitional strategies in behavioural change; Habit; Motivational models of health-related behavior; Social psychology of sexual health; Social-cognitive accounts of motivation and health-related behavior; Cervical screening; Colorectal cancer screening

Presentation Title:  “Creating and Breaking Habits”

Professor of Cognitive Science
Assistant Dean (Research), School of Science
Birkbeck, University of London

Areas of Interest:  My research is broadly concerned with the cognitive processes underlying the control of thought and action. Thus, I am interested in questions such as:  Are there are well-defined control processes implemented by the brain (and if so what functions those processes perform)?  How we are able to do multiple tasks concurrently, and are there constraints on what can be done concurrently due to cognitive limitations?  What computational processes underlie the generation and regulation of sequential behaviour?  I also have interests in general issues relating to the methodology of cognitive modelling. This includes:  The appropriate use of cognitive architectures (or unified theories of cognition) within the study of cognitive psychology. The development of a computational environment to allow psychologists who are not specialist programmers to develop their own simulations

Presentation Title:  “Modulating the Habit System: A Computational Account”

Professor of Social Psychology and Department Head
University of Bath
United Kingdom

Areas of Interest:  Habits; behavioural habits; mental habits; Attitudes; attitude-behaviour relations; Values; values and the self; Health behaviour; (un)healthy eating; exercising; Body image; Consumer behaviour; impulsive buying; Environmental behaviour; traffic mode choice; environmental values

Presentation Title:  “Moments of change: A test of the habit discontinuity hypothesis”

Assistant Professor, Management of Organizations
University of California, Berkeley
Haas School of Business

Areas of Interest:  Juliana’s research explores how people navigate their social worlds. She studies two important aspects of social interactions. First, she studies how people form inferences about others. Second, she studies how people engage with others. In her research, she considers how to help people improve their relationships, reduce conflict, and increase well-being in both the workplace and in their daily lives.

Presentation Title:  “From Ritual to Habitual: The Utility of Rituals for Shaping Goal-Consistent Habitual Behavior”

Senior Lecturer, Psychology
Kings College
London

Areas of Interest:  habit and automaticity; health behaviour and behaviour change  

Presentation Title:  “Habitual instigation vs habitual execution: delineating two types of habitual behavior”

Professor of Marketing and Behavioral Decision Making
Betsy Wood Knapp Term Chair of Innovation and Creativity
John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management
University of California, Los Angeles

Areas of Interest: I am a consumer psychologist who the decision processes underlying consumers’ choices. Much of my recent research focuses on 1) habits and meta-rules and 2) the decision-making of older adult consumers.

Presentation Title:  “Habits and Aging”

Post Doc
Department of Psychology
University of Missouri

Areas of Interest:  Personality Psychology, Social Psychology

Presentation Title:  “Habits and Routines as Sources of Meaning in Life”