Does Time Pressure Reveal Habits? Divergent Results from Outcome Devaluation and Response Remapping Paradigms

Habits are central to daily life and some compulsive disorders, but reliably measuringthem in the lab is challenging. For the first time, across two experiments, we directlycompared two key experimental paradigms for studying lab-developed habits inhumans, the classic Outcome Devaluation task and a newer Response Remappingtask, by systematically manipulating time constraints for responses. In the outcomedevaluation task, longer preparation time led to more habitual actions,counterintuitively, possibly due to response withholding biases that initially maskedhabitual tendencies. In contrast, the response remapping task showed the expectedpattern – habits dominated under more response time pressure (200–500 ms) andweakened when more time was available. Overall, the response remapping taskelicited stronger habit tendencies than the outcome devaluation task, suggesting thateach paradigm engages distinct cognitive processes –response inhibition versusautomatic action selection– one requiring people to inhibit a learned response, andthe other relying on fast, automatic actions. Our findings reveal that habit expressionis highly sensitive to task structure and underlying mechanisms. This directcomparison underscores the consideration of distinct cognitive and motivationalfactors driving habitual responses and highlights that habits reflect multipledissociable mechanisms rather than a uniform phenomenon.