Habit as History-Guided Attention: Reconstructing Addiction Through Cognitive Neuroscience,Affective Biography and Clinical Translation

Abstract

Dominant conceptions of habit in addiction science remain theoretically limited. Dual-process and stimulus-response accounts explain behavioural repetition, but they insufficiently specify why particular cues become compelling, how salience narrows in patterned ways and how lived history enters the architecture of compulsion. This review synthesises cognitive neuroscience, attentional science, developmental psychopathology and clinical research to propose an alternative formulation: habit as history-guided attention. On this account, habitual action is not mindless repetition but the enactment of salience structures sedimented through reinforcement history, affective learning and relational experience. The article first critiques prevailing models of addiction then develops a tripartite framework distinguishing goal-directed, stimulus-driven and history-guided attention. It next examines how affective biography and developmental experience shape attentional bias, reconceptualises compulsion as a narrowing of attentional possibility considering implications for assessment and intervention. Integrating work on reward learning, salience attribution, trauma, stress sensitisation, and mindfulness-based relapse prevention, the review argues that addiction is more adequately understood as a historically organised attentional ecology than as the endpoint of automatic stimulus-response habit.

Keywords

addiction habit attention cognitive neuroscience dynamic systems affective biography semantic memory clinical intervention

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