Collection

The role of habit in decision-making

Submission status: Open
Submission deadline: 01 August 2025

The Editors at Communications Psychology, Nature Communications, and Scientific Reports invite research that studies the role of habits in decision-making.

How habits influence actions is a longstanding topic in cognitive neuroscience. Computational accounts model the role of habits across decision-making domains, from motor control to value-based decision making.

The aim of this curated Collection is to bring together high-quality publications spanning the range of fields interested habit as a component of decision-making to foster cross-disciplinary exchange. Relevant work may come from a range of fields, including but not limited to behavioural neuroscience, behavioural economics, public policy and studies consumer behaviour.

The call for papers is accordingly open to research reflecting a broad range of questions including research that investigates how habits act as an input signal into the decision-making process to studies targeting habits for interventions.

The journals will consider submissions of research Articles, Registered Reports, and Resources on the topic. More information on the different formats can be found here. If you are interested in contributing a review, primer, or opinion piece, please email the Editors directly. We will highlight relevant publications in this Collection.

To submit, see the participating journals

Research

Cognitive computational model reveals repetition bias in a sequential decision-making task

Using a sequential decision making task and cognitive modeling, we show that human decisions are best explained by a combination of repetition bias and goal directed reward-based behavior.
- Eric Legler
- Darío Cuevas Rivera
- Stefan Kiebel
ArticleOpen Access13 Jun 2025 Communications Psychology
Stability and robustness of idiosyncratic choice bias

Choice bias - the tendency to prefer one option over another for no apparent reason - is stable for at least 22 months in perceptual tasks. While feedback can induce choice bias, its effect diminishes within weeks, suggesting a different underlying mechanism.
- Lior Lebovich
- Lea Kaplan
- Yonatan Loewenstein
ArticleOpen Access17 May 2025 Communications Psychology
Model-free decision-making underlies motor errors in rapid sequential movements under threat

Reinforcement learning strategies and motor performance are linked. Participants show poorer motor performance when they adopt or shift towards a model-free strategy under threat of electric shocks than when they use a model-based strategy.
- Pranav Sankhe
- Masahiko Haruno
ArticleOpen Access27 Aug 2024 Communications Psychology
Synergizing habits and goals with variational Bayes

Intelligent agents can perform two types of behavior, habitual and goal-directed. The authors propose a deep learning framework using a variational Bayes approach, which computationally explains many aspects of the interaction between the two types of behaviors in sensorimotor tasks.
- Dongqi Han
- Kenji Doya
- Jun Tani
ArticleOpen Access25 May 2024 Nature Communications

The role of habit in decision-making

Research

Cognitive computational model reveals repetition bias in a sequential decision-making task

Stability and robustness of idiosyncratic choice bias

Model-free decision-making underlies motor errors in rapid sequential movements under threat

Synergizing habits and goals with variational Bayes

Further Reading from the Nature Portfolio

Bad habits–good goals? Meta-analysis and translation of the habit construct to alcoholism

Rethinking model-based and model-free influences on mental effort and striatal prediction errors

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