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THEORY-1184: In three laboratory studies of healthy humans, offering a costless avoidance response for a stimulus never paired with the aversive outcome led people to use it, and withdrawing the response then raised their expectancy of the outcome for that stimulus; signalling of the response is a confound

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Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagslearning-and-conditioning, psychopathology-and-treatment
SourceLIT-1477 — A systematic review of human avoidance learning: Cognition, computation, and methods
ExtendsTHEORY-920 — As Mancinelli and Bach's systematic review reports it, rating it B, in three laboratory studies of healthy humans a signalled, costless avoidance response offered for a stimulus never paired with the aversive outcome was used, and withdrawing it raised expectancy of the outcome for that stimulus, though Xia et al. (2019) found no change in skin conductance or startle; every study signalled the response's availability, which may itself have read as a danger cue
Bears onQUESTION-327 — Does available avoidance leave threat expectancy uncorrected in proportion to how few unavoided disconfirming trials it allows, in people with anxiety disorders as in healthy controls, and does performing and then losing an unsignalled avoidance response raise threat expectancy for a stimulus never paired with harm, scaling with how much the person avoided?

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Source

Mancinelli & Bach (preprint 2025; NBR 2026), LIT-1477, read in full from the PsyArXiv preprint in NOTE-1134. The three primary studies (Cameron et al. 2022; Engelhard et al. 2015; Xia et al. 2019) were not read. What the review reports of them is THEORY-920, which this entry extends.

The claim

The review states, rated B, that “signalling the availability of a costless AR for a previously and currently never punished CS (i.e., the CS-) has been observed to elicit this AR, and to increase threat expectation once this AR option is removed” (pp. 19–20): avoidance execution “can propagate to CS-”. NOTE-1134 records it as claim C4, moderate, confounded by signalling. The authors themselves raise the confound: the signal that avoidance is available “might be understood by participants as a signal for US delivery” (p. 19).

This entry states the finding of the three studies in the record’s voice rather than as the review reports it. It does not carry the authors’ explanation, that people infer danger counterfactually from having avoided.

What would settle it

The promote_when, carried from THEORY-920 unchanged: a study with a continuously available, unsignalled avoidance response, showing that performing and then losing it raises threat expectancy for a safe stimulus in proportion to how much the person avoided. QUESTION-327 asks the same. Studies that keep the signal cannot settle it.

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