Editorial: Habits: plasticity, learning and freedom

" During much of our waking lives, we act according to our habits, from the time we rise and go through our morning routines until we fall asleep after evening routines. Taken in this way, habits have long attracted the interest of philosophers and psychologists, and they have been alternatively praised and cursed. " This is a passage extracted from a highly cited article by Ann Graybiel, one of the most important researchers on habits in present times (Graybiel, 2008). Indeed, most people agree on considering habits one of the crucial aspects of human behavior. However, although laboratory experiments have contributed to advance our understanding on this issue, the difference between habitual and non-habitual behavior is not clear in real-life conditions. This distinction was established in animal research some decades ago (Dickinson, 1985), but the opposition between goal-directed actions and habits seems to fall short in the case of humans. Are habits definitely rigid, unconscious, automatic, and non-teleological? Motor routines, such as those learnt by a beginner piano player, are one of the main examples of habits in neuroscientific literature. If habits are assigned the four characteristics mentioned above, the relationship between well-learned motor routines and the ability of the experienced pianist to improvise will be rejected. How is it possible that motor routines lead to behavioral plasticity, such as improvisation? Habits allow human agents to release cognitive resources in the performance of well-known actions. This is essential for dual-tasking, as many experiments in neuroscience suggest. Furthermore, it is also useful to enhance the cognitive control of actions, as well as to direct habits to achieve a goal and consciously redress them when needed. In this collection of articles we discuss the role of habits in human behavioral plasticity, learning, and freedom. To our knowledge, this is the first multidisciplinary approach on habits including contributions from the fields of neuroscience If we accept that habits are key elements of human behavior, as Graybiel states, they have to be analyzed from different perspectives. Thus, the opening contributions of this e-book are two multidisciplinary approaches from neuroscience and philosophy, in which we develop in depth our position regarding habits and behavioral plasticity (Bernacer and Murillo, 2014; Lombo and Giménez-Amaya, 2014). We then present a block of articles explaining the notion of habit through history, keeping in mind its influence on contemporary neuroscience. Within this block, Barandiaran and Di Paolo show the evolution …