Reducing shock imminence eliminates poor avoidance in rats

Abstract

In signaled active avoidance (SigAA), rats learn to suppress Pavlovian freezing and emit actions to remove threats and prevent footshocks. SigAA is critical for understanding aversively motivated instrumental behavior and anxiety-related active coping. However, with standard protocols ∼25% of rats exhibit high freezing and poor avoidance. This has dampened enthusiasm for the paradigm and stalled progress. We demonstrate that reducing shock imminence with long-duration warning signals leads to greater freezing suppression and perfect avoidance in all subjects. This suggests that instrumental SigAA mechanisms evolved to cope with distant harm and protocols that promote inflexible Pavlovian reactions are poorly designed to study avoidance.