Abstract
Most of our daily routines are determined by habits. However, the experienced ease and automaticity of habit formation and execution comes at a cost when no longer appropriate habits have to be overcome. So far, proactive and reactive control strategies have been identified that prevent inappropriate habit execution either by preparation or “on the fly”. Here, the authors present evidence for a ...
Abstract
Most of our daily routines are determined by habits. However, the experienced ease and automaticity of habit formation and execution comes at a cost when no longer appropriate habits have to be overcome. So far, proactive and reactive control strategies have been identified that prevent inappropriate habit execution either by preparation or “on the fly”. Here, the authors present evidence for a third, retroactive control strategy: In two experiments, applying the list‐method of directed forgetting, the accessibility of newly learned and practiced stimulus‐response rules was significantly reduced when participants were cued to forget the rules as compared to a group that was cued to remember. Results thus show that directed forgetting, so far only observed and investigated for episodic memory traces, can also be applied to habits. The findings further emphasize the adaptive value of forgetting and can be taken as a retroactive strategy of habit control.
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