Maya Bar Or
Sagol School of neuroscience and Department of Neurobiology, The George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel-Aviv University
A gamified smartphone application for habit induction and manipulation
Project description
The goal-directed and habitual systems are believed to have a crucial role in controlling instrumental behavior and successfully adapting to one’s environment. When malfunctioning, they are associated with various clinical conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and addiction.
Though extensively studied, the research of habit learning in humans was not yet successful in creating habits in an experimental environment, and to this day no valid experimental method has been established yet.
Here, we propose to test the effect of the duration of training on the development of habits using various methods with a novel smartphone app game that will allow us to investigate the formation of habits in real-life environment. We believe that both the ecological nature of the experiment and the different examination of the behavior will allow us to obtain a more integrated and complete understanding of the goal-directed and habitual systems.
About me
Maya graduated her M.A in Psychology from Haifa University in 2020, where she studied the neural circuits of goal-directed and habitual behavior. Maya joined the Ph.D. program of Sagol School of Neuroscience in 2021. Here, she hopes to continue exploring goal-directed and habitual behaviors and related pathologies, and further understand their neural mechanisms.