A Computational Account of Approach-Avoidance Conflict in a Foraging-Inspired Search Paradigm
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: An approach-avoidance conflict (AAC) arises when the same action promises reward but also carries potential harm. Here, we examined how humansinitiate and sustain engagement under such conflict using an online foraging-inspired AAC task. Eighty-seven participants repeatedly encounteredvisual search fields associated with four instructed reward-punishment states and decided whether to enter each field and how extensively to search it,allowing us to distinguish passive avoidance as withheld entry from active within-field avoidance as early search termination. Participants committed tosearch more often and explored more extensively when expected rewards were high and punishments were low. Agent-based behavioral modeling indicated that initialand sustained engagement could be characterized at different levels of behavioral granularity: commitment to search was best explained by additivereward-punishment evaluation with state-independent trial drift, whereas search extent was best captured by a click-wise stopping process inspired by themarginal value theorem, a foraging account of when to leave a current patch for alternatives. These findings suggest that avoidance under conflict isnot a single decision, but unfolds across separable decisions about whether to engage, how long to persist, and when to leave.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7212433670