Time-dependent competition between goal-directed and habitual response preparation

Several theoretical views of automaticity are discussed. Most of these suggest that automaticity should be diagnosed by looking at the presence of features such as unintentional, uncontrolled/uncontrollable, goal independent, autonomous, purely stimulus driven, unconscious, efficient, and fast. Contemporary views further suggest that these features should be investigated separately. The authors examine whether features of automaticity can be disentangled on a conceptual level, because only then is the separate investigation of them worth the effort. They conclude that the conceptual analysis of features is to a large extent feasible. Not all researchers agree with this position, however. The authors show that assumptions of overlap among features are determined by the other researchers' views of automaticity and by the models they endorse for information processing in general.

As animals learn novel behavioural responses, performance is maintained by two dissociable influences. Initial responding is goal-directed and under voluntary control, but overtraining of the same response routine leads to behavioural autonomy and the development of habits that are no longer voluntary or goal-directed. Rats normally show goal-directed performance after limited training, indexed by sensitivity to changes in the value of reward, but this sensitivity to goal value is lost with extended training. Rats with selective lesions of the prelimbic medial prefrontal cortex showed no sensitivity to goal value after either limited or extended training, whereas rats with lesions of the infralimbic region of the medial prefrontal cortex showed the opposite pattern of deficit, a marked sensitivity to goal value after both limited and extended training. This double-dissociation suggests that the prelimbic region is responsible for voluntary response performance and the infralimbic cortex mediates the incremental ability of extended training to override this goal-directed behaviour.