Force of habit
Most people have habits that guide them through daily life — for example, their path to work in the morning, or their bedtime routine. The brain patterns that drive this behavior are not well-understood, but a new study from MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research shows that habit formation appears to be an innate ability that is fine-tuned by experience — specifically, the costs and rewards of certain choices.Neuroscientists led by Institute Professor Ann Graybiel found that untrained monkeys performing a simple visual scanning task gradually developed efficient patterns that allowed them to minimize the time it took to receive their reward.The task was designed to mimic natural scenarios — a nearly infinite number of choices for the monkeys to make and an unpredictable reward structure. “We wanted to create an environment that would be similar to the world we walk around in every day — an environment where there...