Subregional specificity in human striatal habit learning: a meta-analytic review of the fMRI literature

Research on the neural basis of human habit learning has made significant advances in recent years, creating a need for synthesis of disparate results. We conducted a meta-analytic review of fMRI studies on human habit learning to evaluate the hypothesis that the human putamen plays a similar role to the rodent dorsolateral striatum in habitual behavior. Results from studies using outcome devaluation, sequential decision-making, and motor sequence learning tasks were consistent with this hypothesis, whereas results from studies using probabilistic classification and maze navigation tasks were not. It is possible that the lack of consistent activation of the putamen during the performance of probabilistic classification and maze navigation tasks may indicate that these tasks are not as well-suited for the study of habit behavior in humans, and that activations observed using these tasks reflect activity of both the goal-directed and habit learning systems.