Habits

Youna Vandaele, PhD, is a neuroscientist working in the field of decision-making, behavioral control and addiction at the Inserm laboratory of experimental and clinical neurosciences, at the University of Poitiers, France.The goal of her research is to understand the behavioral and neurobiological bases of maladaptive behaviors characterizing psychiatric disorders such as addiction, using animal models. She is particularly interested in improving the translational validity of animal models of addiction, by testing reward seeking in more complex scenarios that better capture the reality of alcohol or drug use in individuals suffering from this disorder.

• Section I: Definitions, operationalization and investigation of habits.- Defining and Measuring Habits Across Different Fields of Research.- Outcome devaluation as a means for distinguishing habits from goal-directed actions.- Situating habit and goal direction in a general view of instrumental behavior.- The rate-correlation theory of goal-directed behavior: an update.- Multi-plasticities: Distinguishing context-specific habits from complex perseverations.- Section II: The neurobiology of habit.- Navigation through the complex world – the neurophysiology of decision-making processes.- Alternative Approaches to Understanding Habit Learning in the Dorsolateral Striatum.- Prefrontal control of actions and habits.- The Role of Dopamine in Training Automaticity.- Historical and Modern Perspectives on the Neuroscience of Habits.- Section III: The place of habit in addiction.- Goal-directed and habitual control in human drug addiction.- The role of implicit associations in alcohol and substance use disorders.- Impulsivity and compulsivity in Bayesian reinforcement learning models of addiction: a computational critique of the habit theory.- Interaction between habitual and goal-directed processes in addiction.