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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 12, 2026

Investigating Pain-Related Avoidance Behavior using a Robotic Arm-Reaching Paradigm

Investigating Pain-Related Avoidance Behavior using a Robotic Arm-Reaching Paradigm

Published on: October 3, 2020

Recurrent, robust and scalable patterns underlie human approach and avoidance.

Byoung Woo Kim¹, David N Kennedy, Joseph Lehár

¹Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America.

|June 10, 2010

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

This study reveals predictable, law-like patterns in approach and avoidance behaviors, quantifying how individuals value stimuli. These findings offer a new way to understand decision-making and potentially diagnose psychiatric conditions.

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Area of Science:

Behavioral Economics
Quantitative Psychology
Neuroscience

Background:

Approach and avoidance behaviors assess stimulus value (rewarding/aversive).
Keypress procedures quantify these behaviors, measuring work to approach, avoid, or ignore stimuli.
Investigating lawful quantitative principles governing these behaviors is crucial.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine if approach/avoidance behavior follows lawful quantitative principles.
To assess if these principles encode known reward/aversion function features.
To identify regular patterns in keypress responses to motivational stimuli.

Main Methods:

Three experiments used keypress tasks with diverse stimuli (faces, photos, food).
Controlled for hunger and satiety states.
Applied iterative modeling to identify individual-based, law-like patterns.

Main Results:

Identified consistent, robust, and scalable power-law patterns across stimulus types.
Observed a preference trade-off between approach and avoidance.
Discovered value and saturation functions linking preference intensity to uncertainty and standard deviation.

Conclusions:

Law-like patterns align with prospect theory, matching law, and alliesthesia.
Patterns are consistent with mean-variance and expected utility theories of risk.
These quantitative patterns may enable phenotyping of normative and pathological brain function.