Active avoidance responses (ARs) are instrumental behaviors that prevent harm. Adaptive ARs may contribute to active coping, whereas maladaptive avoidance habits are implicated in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders. The AR learning mechanism has remained elusive, as successful avoidance trials produce no obvious reinforcer. We used a novel outcome-devaluation procedure in rats to show that ARs are positively reinforced by response-produced feedback cues that develop into safety signals during training. Males were sensitive to feedback devaluation after moderate training, but not overtraining, consistent with a transition from goal-directed to habitual avoidance. Using chemogenetics and feedback devaluation, we also show that goal-directed vs. habitual ARs depend on dorsomedial vs. dorsolateral striatum, suggesting a significant overlap between the mechanisms of avoidance and rewarded instrumental behavior. Females were insensitive to feedbackdevaluation due to a remarkable context-dependence of counterconditioning. However, degrading the contingency between avoidance and feedback suggests that both sexes rely on safety signals to perform goal-directed ARs.
Sears et al. (Mon,) studied this question.