Characterizing human habits in the lab

Habits pose a fundamental puzzle for those aiming to understand human behavior. They pervade our everyday lives and dominate some forms of psychopathology but are extremely hard to elicit in the lab. In this Registered Report, we develop novel experimental paradigms grounded in computational models, which suggest that habit strength should be proportional to the frequency of behavior and, in contrast to previous research, independent of value. Specifically, we manipulate how often participants perform responses in two tasks varying action repetition without, or separately from, variations in value. Moreover, we ask how this frequency-based habitization relates to value-based operationalizations of habit and self-reported propensities for habitual behavior in real life