People often have good intentions but fail to adhere to them. Implementation intentions, a form of strategic planning, can help people to close this intention–behavior gap. Their effectiveness has been proposed to depend on the mental formation of a stimulus–response association between a trigger and target behavior, thereby creating an “instant habit.” If implementation intentions do indeed lead to reliance on habitual control, then this may come at the cost of reduced behavioral flexibility. Furthermore, we would expect a shift from recruitment of corticostriatal brain regions implicated in goal-directed control toward habit regions. To test these ideas, we performed a fMRI study in which participants received instrumental training supported by either implementation or goal intentions, followed by an outcome revaluation to test reliance on habitual versus goal-directed control. We found that implementation intentions led to increased efficiency early in training, as reflected by higher accuracy, faster RTs, and decreased anterior caudate engagement. However, implementation intentions did not reduce behavioral flexibility when goals changed during the test phase, nor did it affect the underlying corticostriatal pathways. In addition, this study showed that “slips of action” toward devalued outcomes are associated with reduced activity in brain regions implicated in goal-directed control (ventromedial prefrontal cortex and lateral orbitofrontal cortex) and increased activity of the fronto-parietal salience network (including the insula, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and SMA). In conclusion, our behavioral and neuroimaging findings suggest that strategic if–then planning does not lead to a shift from goal-directed toward habitual control.

The dorsal striatum plays a key role in the learning and expression of instrumental reward associations that are acquired through direct experience. However, not all learning about instrumental actions require direct experience. Instead, humans and other animals are also capable of acquiring instrumental actions by observing the experiences of others. In this study, we investigated the extent to which human dorsal striatum is involved in observational as well as experiential instrumental reward learning. Human participants were scanned with fMRI while they observed a confederate over a live video performing an instrumental conditioning task to obtain liquid juice rewards. Participants also performed a similar instrumental task for their own rewards. Using a computational model-based analysis, we found reward prediction errors in the dorsal striatum not only during the experiential learning condition but also during observational learning. These results suggest a key role for the dorsal striatum in learning instrumental associations, even when those associations are acquired purely by observing others.

The ability to volitionally regulate emotions helps to adapt behavior to changing environmental demands and can alleviate subjective distress. We show that a cognitive strategy of detachment attenuates subjective and physiological measures of anticipatory anxiety for pain and reduces reactivity to receipt of pain itself. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we locate the potential site and source of this modulation of anticipatory anxiety in the medial prefrontal/anterior cingulate and anterolateral prefrontal cortex, respectively.