Rapid Formation of Psychological Inertia in Simple Learning Tasks: A View from Visual Working Memory

Psychological inertia, commonly referred to as “habit”, denotes the irrational inclination towards initial choices and resistance to change. Previous studies have indicated that psychological inertia may manifest in complex learning tasks involving processes such as long-term memory, reasoning, and decision-making, often assessed through questionnaires. Despite humans' remarkable ability to adapt flexibly to new environments and rapidly learn new tasks through instructions, it remains uncertain whether psychological inertia could develop in simple learning tasks focusing on working memory. To address this gap, we employed two recall tasks presenting simple stimuli (i.e. color and orientation) to measure working memory performance. The aim was to investigate whether individuals' allocation patterns of memory capacity became fixed, forming psychological inertia, after brief practice. Additionally, 4 Hz transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) was applied to the right posterior parietal lobe to increase memory capacity, starting before or after practice. The experimental results revealed that participants exhibited different memory resource allocation patterns in subsequent tasks only when their memory capacity was enhanced before the practice phase. However, practicing before the increase in memory capacity did not lead to changes in memory resource allocation patterns. Consequently, we conclude that individuals could develop psychological inertia after only a few practice trials in simple learning tasks. However, this inertia does not seem to transfer from one task to another.