nucleation

THEORY-1189: In laboratory avoidance learning in healthy humans, an avoidance response that remains available during extinction persists, in some participants for hundreds of unpunished trials, and keeps expectancy of the aversive outcome higher than in people denied it; the more effective and the cheaper the response, the slower it extinguishes

2 min read

Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagslearning-and-conditioning, psychopathology-and-treatment
SourceLIT-1477 — A systematic review of human avoidance learning: Cognition, computation, and methods
ExtendsTHEORY-901 — As Mancinelli and Bach's systematic review of avoidance learning in healthy humans reports it, rating both A, an avoidance response left available during extinction persists, in some participants for hundreds of unpunished trials, and keeps expectancy of the aversive outcome higher than in people denied it (nine studies); and less effective or costlier responses extinguish faster (six studies, one exception)
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?

Graph View

Source

Mancinelli & Bach (preprint 2025; NBR 2026), LIT-1477, read in full from the PsyArXiv preprint in NOTE-1134. What the review reports, with its ratings and counts, is THEORY-901, which this entry extends. The primary studies were not read.

The claim

The review states as a phenomenon of human avoidance learning, rated A, that an avoidance response left available during extinction persists and protects threat expectancy from extinction (nine studies): in two older studies 42% and 47% of participants still avoided by the 500th would-be- unpunished trial, and people allowed to avoid kept higher expectancy of the aversive outcome in a later test than people denied the option. It states, also rated A, that less effective or more effortful responses give less protection from extinction (six studies, one exception). NOTE-1134 records both as the review’s claim C3, strong.

The authors explain the persistence by effective avoidance leaving fewer chances to detect that the contingency has changed, and mark that explanation “putatively”. This entry does not carry the explanation, only the phenomena stated as general for the laboratory paradigm.

What would settle it

The promote_when, carried from THEORY-901 unchanged: a study, preferably in people with an anxiety disorder as well as healthy controls, that varies the effectiveness of an available avoidance response and measures threat expectancy trial by trial. QUESTION-327 asks the same. Further healthy-volunteer studies with signalled, instructed button responses cannot settle it.

Backlinks