Tools

Avoidance behaviors are a key feature of anxiety disorders and OCD. However, we lack a nuanced understanding of the full variety of avoidance behaviors and the associated neural systems.

 

We developed the Tap-To-Safety Task to address this gap. The Tap-To-Safety Task is a novel fMRI paradigm designed to elicit repetitive avoidance behavior, a sparsely studied but clinically-relevant form of avoidance. Participants are presented with shapes onscreen one at a time: a threat-cue paired with shock, safety-cues never paired with shock, and safe stimuli resembling the threat cue. Once participants learn the shape-shock pairing, choice trials are introduced in which participants can tap a button repeatedly to gain protection from shock (i.e., repetitive avoidance) while relinquishing reward points. Participants must balance their motivation to gain safety with their desire to pursue rewards. Repetitive avoidance behavior thus comes at a cost, similar to how compulsions in OCD or other problematic avoidance behaviors interfere with one's values and goals.

 

The Tap-To-Safety Task can be administered with or without fMRI. Code is available upon request.