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Habits of thought
People often perform actions out of habit. They take their usual route to work, even when they know it's closed for construction; they reach for their keys, even when they know the door is already open; or they repeat a button press in a laboratory decision task, even when they know that a different button would earn more money. Recent theories have had great success in characterizing the nature of these habitual actions, and have shown how habits can facilitate good decision-making at low computational cost. Yet, there is an open question about the scope of habitual control. Most of the work on habits has focused on habitual control of simple motor actions (like pulling a lever), or simple external choices (like selecting one stimulus over another in a laboratory decision task). But habits could also profitably be used to control more complex, abstract cognitive mechanisms. In this talk, I will present evidence on three hypotheses: that habits can control (1) which goals people set, (2) which decision options people generate, and (3) which information gets loaded into working memory. These results contribute to the growing understanding of the role that habits play in higher-level cognition.