What determines whether you can deal with new situations in
a flexible way or act out of habit? A team of psychologists from the University
of Amsterdam (UvA) have discovered that this can be predicted by the strength
of specific brain connections. A person’s brain can be studied to predict if
they will act in a goal-directed way or based on habitual action. Such
knowledge is relevant to the treatment of drug addicts or patients with impulse
control disorders. Dr Sanne de Wit, Ms Poppy Watson and Prof. Richard
Ridderinkhof from the UvA led the research, which was funded by the Netherlands
Organisation for Scientific Research. The results were published in the Journal
of Neuroscience on 29 August.