Introduction

A habit is a learned sequence of behaviors that, once sufficiently practised, becomes automatic
and is executed with minimal conscious deliberation. William James (1890), in his foundational
account in The Principles of Psychology, described habits as the enormous flywheel of society,
arguing that repetition progressively reduces the cognitive effort required to perform an action
until it is discharged almost reflexively. This insight was later operationalized within behaviorist
frameworks: Thorndike's (1911) Law of Effect established that behaviors followed by satisfying
outcomes are strengthened and become habitual, while Hull's (1943) drive-reduction theory
formalized the role of reinforcement in habit consolidation. Contemporary neuroscientific work
has extended these early formulations, locating habitual behavior in cortico-striatal circuits,
particularly the dorsolateral striatum, which encodes stimulus-response associations that operate
outside volitional control (Graybiel, 2008).

Habit interference arises when an established habit disrupts the acquisition or retrieval of a
competing behavioral pattern. Two mechanisms have been identified in the learning literature.
Proactive interference occurs when a previously learned habit impedes the formation of a new
one — the older response tendency intrudes upon the newer learning. Retroactive interference,
by contrast, occurs when newly acquired information disrupts the retrieval of an earlier-learned
response. Both mechanisms reflect the competitive nature of memory and behavioral
consolidation: learned associations are not stored in isolation but interact with one another, and
their relative strength determines which response dominates at the point of execution. The
present experiment employs a card-sorting paradigm to elicit and measure this interference,
exploiting the well-established principle that sorting cards according to one rule creates a
response disposition that resists modification when a new rule is introduced.

Review of Literature
Research on habit interference has gained renewed empirical momentum from dual-process
theories of cognition, which distinguish between automatic, habit-driven behavior and
deliberative, goal-directed action. Dickinson (1985) provided an influential early framework
distinguishing these systems experimentally through outcome devaluation paradigms,
demonstrating that well-practiced behaviors become insensitive to changes in reward value — a
hallmark of habitual control. Building on this, Dezfouli and Balleine (2012) used computational
modeling to show that the transition from goal-directed to habitual responding is governed by the
relative precision of action-outcome predictions, providing a formal account of why habits resist
updating even when they are no longer adaptive.
Neuroimaging studies have helped specify the brain regions implicated in habit interference.
Ashby, Turner, and Horvitz (2010) reviewed evidence that the basal ganglia, particularly the
putamen, are critical for the storage and expression of stimulus-response habits, while the
prefrontal cortex supports the inhibitory control needed to override habitual tendencies when
new learning is required. Their review indicates that when prefrontal resources are reduced —
through cognitive load, fatigue, or stress — habitual responses are more likely to intrude on
novel task performance, directly relevant to the proactive interference observed in card-sorting
tasks. More recently, Hardwick, Forrence, Krakauer, and Haith (2019) demonstrated in a motor
learning study that speed-accuracy trade-offs during skill acquisition influence whether
behaviors become habitual or remain goal-directed, with faster, less deliberate responses being
more susceptible to interference from earlier-learned patterns.

The card-sorting paradigm has a long history in cognitive psychology as a tool for studying rule-
switching and interference. Studies using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) have
consistently shown that participants are slower and more error-prone when required to adopt a
new sorting rule after practicing an established one, and this cost is attributed to perseverative
interference from the previous habit (Miyake et al., 2000). More broadly, Carden and Wood
(2018), reviewing the mechanisms of habit formation and disruption, note that interference
between competing behavioral tendencies is greatest when new and old habits share contextual
cues and response features, suggesting that interference is not simply a function of habit strength
but also of the structural overlap between competing response sets.

Individual differences in working memory capacity have also been shown to moderate
susceptibility to habit interference. Kane and Engle (2003) demonstrated that individuals with
lower working memory spans were less able to maintain novel task goals in the face of prepotent
habitual responses, making them more vulnerable to proactive interference. This line of work
underscores that habit interference is not a uniform phenomenon but is shaped by executive
function resources available to suppress competing responses. Taken together, this body of
evidence supports the hypothesis guiding the present study: that the habit formed during Series I
of the card-sorting task will produce measurable negative transfer in Series II, with participants
exhibiting slower sorting times when the spatial arrangement of the tray is altered.

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