Habits play a significant role in an individual's daily life, including their eating behaviour. An imbalance between habits and goal-directed behaviour, however, is presumed to contribute to maladaptive behaviours such as eating disorders. Understanding habit formation and its influence on eating behaviour is therefore particularly important given the implications for an individual’s health, well-being, and the development of disordered eating patterns. Especially since the prevalence of obesity continues to rise while eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN) remain pervasive and challenging to treat. This research aims to offer more insight into the relationship between eating behaviour and habits. To investigate this relationship, participants filled out the Revised Three-Factor Eating Questionnaire 18 Item (TFEQ-R18), measuring their eating behaviour, and took part in a new computerized version of the Pavlovian Instrumental Transfer (PIT) task. Data analysis revealed a correlation between Emotional Eating (EE) and the outcome-specific transfer effect but did not reveal further relations between any of the dimension scores of the TFEQ-R18 and the transfer effects. These results suggest a relation between EE and habitual behaviour but do not indicate any other relationships between eating behaviour and habits. In addition, the PIT task did not elicit any significant transfer effects. The findings of this study could suggest that a general PIT task may not effectively capture habit formation in the context of eating behaviour. Therefore, future research should focus on developing a direct effective equivalent of the food-related PIT task.

Keywords: Habits, Eating behaviour, PIT task, General transfer effect, Outcome-specific transfer effect