Making and Breaking Habits

Project Information

HABIT

Grant agreement ID: 947307

DOI

10.3030/947307

EC signature date 18 December 2020

Start date 1 October 2021

End date 30 September 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 910,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 910,00

Coordinated by

THE PROVOST, FELLOWS, FOUNDATION SCHOLARS & THE OTHER MEMBERS OF BOARD, OF THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY & UNDIVIDED TRINITY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH NEAR DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - HABIT (Making and Breaking Habits)

Reporting period: 2024-10-01 to 2026-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Every minute of every day, our brain’s habit system is hard at work automating well-practiced actions so our brains can focus on new and more complex challenges. This does not always work to our benefit, however. Research has implicated hyper-expression of habits in a range of compulsive behaviours, from drug addiction to out-of-control spending, binge-eating and obsessive-compulsive rituals. Despite the importance of habits in our lives, there are major gaps in our understanding of how they are acquired in humans and a virtual absence of research into how they can be broken. HABIT aims to change this by leveraging the millisecond precision of electrophysiology with the breadth of large-scale phenotyping via smartphone to develop a new mechanistic model of how habits and developed and broken, in the lab and real-life. With clear potential for impact, the fundamental insights from this project will reveal how we can harness the power of habits in our lives and better understand key aspects of mental illness.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The Making and Breaking Habits project is well-underway. We have developed several new tools for studying how people form habits and are currently testing a variety of causal manipulations designed to make and break habits. These investigations to date have included smartphone-based tests, as well as in-lab and at-home computerised formats and two electrophysiological paradigms. In one study, we gathered data from just over 5000 participants who use the smartphone app, Neureka, and were able to show that patterns of gameplay on a simple diamond shooting game were sensitive to individual differences in compulsivity. In another part of this project, we have developed a smartphone game that allows us to study in fine detail how habits are formed in app users over a 7 day period. We have finished collecting data on one of our electrophysiology studies and have been able to show how habits change brain activity over a 20 day period. A second electrophysiology study is almost completed and will allow us to 'decode' what people represent in their brain as they develop and execute habits. Other ongoing work concerns interventions that allow us to help people make or break habits more readily, including an active study that investigates if simulating the future while performing an action protects against forming strong habits.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This project has a central focus on real world application and investigation of cognitive neuroscience research on habits. Through a series of careful causal studies and large-scale app-based projects, we are driving forward our understanding of how habits form in real world settings and critically, how they can lead to issues with addiction or other forms of compulsion. At the end of this project, we aim to produce a detailed and mechanistic understanding of how habits form and are overcome, as well a set of practically-useful interventions or actions that people can use to make habits work for them, making good ones and breaking bad ones, at will.