Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Repetitive habitual behaviour can persist even when it conflicts with goals. This is termed an action slip. Wood et al. (2023) demonstrated this effect using a novel procedure, where participants' performance was strong on congruent trials but comparatively poor on incongruent trials. The current study extends their work by exploring a devaluation version of the experiment, followed by a further experiment that manipulates training duration. The devaluation approach eliminated the congruency effect, while reinstating standard testing with varied training led to its reappearance—even after a short amount of training. These findings challenge the Stimulus-Response (S-R) account and dual-process theory. We discuss the question of whether the congruency effect seen in these experiments is evidence to support a dual-process account of habitual behaviour.