Explaining habits: new concepts for the cognitive science of bad habits and addictions

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition.


This article by Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya and Tom Froese reviews the enactive approach and highlights how it moves beyond by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns.


Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. The enactive approach views habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. The consistent theoretical framework of enactivism sees cognition as “an embodied engagement in which the world is brought forth by the coherent activity of a cogniser in its environment” (Di Paolo, 2009a, p. 12).