14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers from the United States recently managed to determine that our ability to form habits is in fact innate, and that this trait can be further refined and fine-tune by life experiences.
The group, which is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) McGovern Institute for Brain Research, explains that most people have daily routines, even if they are not aware of them.
Over the years, each person develops their own way of getting up in the morning, going to work, or waiting in line. Pull someone out of their routine and you'll make them confused or angry.
Experience plays a critical role in this, scientists now believe. They explain that all choices have their own cost-to-reward ratios, which make them either appealing or repulsive to people.
If the rewards are significant enough, then a person will make that particular choice, and will then become predisposed to make it again, if the exact same or similar circumstances appear.
In order to demonstrate this, the leader of the MIT team and professor Ann Graybiel used a number of monkeys to test how visual patterns are formed in the animals.
This was done by presenting them with a grid consisting of dots. While the monkeys were checking out the dots, specialized software was recording the motion of their ways, so as to determine how was it that they looked at each of the points in the array,
If the animals cooperated and looked at all the points, then the researchers would give them a reward. In time, the monkeys developed a highly-efficient pattern of scanning the array of dots, which minimized the time they had to wait before they got a reward.
“We wanted to create an environment that would be similar to the world we walk around in every day – an environment where there are lots of choices the animal can make,” explains Theresa Desrochers.
The research is an MIT graduate student, as well as the lead author of a new paper detailing the findings. The work appears in this week's issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
An interesting result of the investigation was that the monkeys tended to change their patterns of looking at the dots from time to time, even if the patterns were guaranteed to bring them food.
The researchers noticed that, each time the patterns changed, this was for the better. The monkeys were making less and less of an effort in watching the grid. Investigators found no clues as to what prompted this improvement.
The MIT team now plans to design experiments that would conduct similar research on humans.
Video Credit: MIT News Office