Background: Habit-based interventions are increasingly used to sustain behaviours supporting healthy aging, yet how older adults form and break habits remains poorly understood. Understanding these processes is critical to designing effective behavior change strategies for aging populations.
Method: We examined goal-directed and habitual control in 38 healthy older (Mage=69.03,26F) and 36 younger adults (Mage=23.39,22F) using a novel outcome-revaluation paradigm, the Symmetrical Known-Associations Reversal Task, adapted from the Symmetrical Outcome-Revaluation Task to use semantically associated pairings and two-choice responses rather than Go/NoGo. Participants completed training to form valuable and nonvaluable stimulus-response (S-R) habits, followed by a test phase creating response conflict to assess habitual interference and goal-directed flexibility.
Results: During training, both age groups learned S-R associations, though these were more robust for valuable trials. At test, habitual interference was comparable for valuable trials across age groups but differed for nonvaluable trials. Older adults showed a behavioral imbalance where habitual responses interfered with goal-directed control, whereas younger adults' poorer accuracy suggested nonvaluable S-R habits were never sufficiently formed.
Conclusions: Rather than reflecting a shift toward habitual control with age, findings suggest behavior across the lifespan is shaped by what is learned and reinforced. This reframes aging as a context of preserved learning potential, where reward history plays a central role in habit formation. These insights provide a more optimistic foundation for designing habit-based interventions that leverage meaningful outcomes to promote adaptive behavior in aging populations.