ActionContraThreat
Action selection under threat: the complex control of human defense
Run away, sidestep, duck-and-cover, watch: when under threat, humans immediately choreograph a large repertoire of defensive actions. Understanding action-selection under threat is important for anybody wanting to explain why anxiety disorders imply some of these behaviours in harmless situations. Current concepts of human defensive behaviour are largely derived from rodent research and focus on a small number of broad, cross-species, action tendencies. This is likely to underestimate the complexity of the underlying action-selection mechanisms.
In this ERC-funded project, we use virtual reality, motion capture, and magnetoencephalography, to expose the mechanisms by which behaviour under threat is computed and controlled.
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Brochard J, Dayan P, Bach DR (2025). Critical intelligence: Computing defensive behaviour. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 174, 106213. [DOI]
Brookes J, Hall S, Frühholz S, Bach, DR (2023). Immersive VR for investigating threat avoidance: The VRthreat toolkit for Unity. Behavior Research Methods, 56, 5040–5054. [DOI] [Open Data] [Open Code 1] [Open Code 2]
Hutabarat Y, Sporrer JK, Brookes J, Zabbah S, Kornemann L, Domenici P, Bach DR (2025). Human escape follows a structured movement pattern shaped by threat and context. bioRxiv 2025.07.27.662958 (preprint). [DOI]
Sporrer JK*, Brookes J*, Hall S, Zabbah S, Hernandez U & Bach DR (2023). Functional sophistication in human escape. iScience, 26 (11), 108240. [DOI] [Open Data 1] [Open Data 2] [Open Code] [Software 1] [Software 2]
Funding
This project was funded by the European Research Council under agreement ERC-2018 CoG-816564 ActionContraThreat.
