Abstract
Research on defensive behaviour in mammals has in recent years focused on elicited reactions; however, organisms also make active choices when responding to danger. We propose a hierarchical taxonomy of defensive behaviour on the basis of known psychological processes. Included are three categories of reactions (reflexes, fixed reactions and habits) and three categories of goal-directed actions (direct action–outcome behaviours and actions based on implicit or explicit forecasting of outcomes). We then use this taxonomy to guide a summary of findings regarding the underlying neural circuits.
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Acknowledgements
The authors were supported by the US National Institutes of Health (grants R56DA029053 and R01MH38774 to J.L.) and the US Army Research Office (grant W911NF-16-1-0474 to N.D.D.).
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Glossary
- Innate behaviours
-
Behaviours, such as reflexes and fixed responses, that all members of a species share as part of their heritage and that make minimal demands on learning.
- Instrumental responses
-
Responses that are learned because of their relationship with some consequent outcome (such as safety or food) and include both actions and habits.
- Habits
-
Learned behaviours that are acquired as a result of their initial relation to an outcome but do not depend on the value of the outcome.
- Actions
-
Behaviours that result in an expected outcome as a consequence of a previously learned contingency between the behaviour and its outcome (action–outcome behaviours) or of deliberative cognitive forecasting (implicit or explicit) of a possible outcome.
- Reactions
-
Behaviours — such as reflexes, fixed responses and habits — that are directly elicited by innate or learned stimuli.
- Startle
-
A flinch-like behavioural reflex often studied in the laboratory by using sudden, loud acoustic stimuli.
- Pavlovian conditioning
-
The process through which animals learn to associate initially arbitrary stimuli with biologically important stimuli such as threats.
- World model
-
An internal representation of the contingencies of the environment, such as a spatial map or the steps in a task.
- Appetitive conditioning
-
Learning based on the prediction of rewards.
- Active avoidance
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A type of experimental task in which organisms must produce a particular response to avoid harm.
- Reward devaluation
-
An experimental procedure in which the value of an action's outcome is reduced; used to verify that the action is goal-directed as opposed to habitual.
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LeDoux, J., Daw, N. Surviving threats: neural circuit and computational implications of a new taxonomy of defensive behaviour. Nat Rev Neurosci 19, 269–282 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2018.22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2018.22
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