Measuring context-response associations that drive habits.

People achieve important life outcomes of health, financial security, and productivity by repeating operant behavior. To identify whether such operants reflect goal pursuit or habit, the present research introduces a new paradigm that yields objective measures of learning and controls for the motivations of goal pursuit. In two experiments, participants practiced a sequential task of making sushi and then completed a test of the strength of cue-response (habit) associations in memory.

Biased representations of the spatial structure of navigable environments.

Recent studies (e.g., Shelton & McNamara in Cognitive Psychology, 43(4), 274-310, 2001; Valiquette, McNamara, & Smith in Memory and Cognition, 31(3), 479-489, 2003) have demonstrated that judgments of relative direction (JRD) access a single enduring orientation-dependent allocentric representation of the layout of objects in an environment, regardless of whether the space is viewed from one or multiple vantage points.