Promoting Contextually Cued Physical Activity Habits: A Pilot Study Using Cue-Contingent Financial Incentives for Daily Walking

Subjects for this research are recruited on campus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the State University of New York at Albany, and their participation was incentivized. After meeting the eligibility criterion (including have at least some intrinsic motivation for increasing physical activity), downloading the project's iPhone app, and signing the project consent form, all participants will have their step count data recorded for an 8-week study period.

Existing interventions that have successfully improved study participants' health-related behaviors typically find that behavioral changes do not persist beyond 3 months after the intervention period. Fortunately, novel habit formation interventions from the psychology literature offer the potential for building long-term behavioral change and avoiding the common "relapse triangles" observed in these existing behavioral interventions. These new methods are based on the theory that habits are formed through the repetition of the same behavior in response to a stable, environmental cue. After an initial period of repetition, automaticity is formed, and the behavioral response becomes more effortlessly/unconsciously induced by the environmental cue. Behavioral reminders that reinforce a specific behavioral routine-environmental cue pair have been shown to support this initial period of habit formation; however, given the individualized nature of these reminders, a generalizable intervention method has not been developed and empirically tested. This research will use an iPhone app to examine the role of both general informational on contextually cued habits and the use of personalized reminders and financial incentives for using a daily physical activity contextual cue on the persistence of physical activity behavior after the intervention tools are withdrawn.