A key characteristic of adaptive fear is the avoidance of genuinely threatening situations or stimuli. However, excessive avoidance of such hazards can have negative long-term consequences by preventing the acquisition of safety information, thereby maintaining anxiety. Recent research has focused on approach-avoidance (AA) conflicts in foraging tasks under predation threat, particularly in decision-making strategies. However, the impact of individual differences on AA strategies within threatening contexts remains unclear.
We present a novel approach-avoidance paradigm in a virtual foraging task, using a matrix-designed environment to track and visualize AA behavior based on spatial movement. In this study, 242 participants were tasked with collecting a sufficient number of food tokens across three simulated environments (forest, water, desert) over 24 trials to ensure virtual survival. The AA conflict was induced by proportionally linking potential rewards to the probability of encountering an aversive (electrical) stimulus. Each individual had to perform specific AA behaviors, determined by the time spent in each environment and spatial movement across the field. Our data validate this task and demonstrate the utility of a gamified virtual reality design that uses both rewards and punishments to elicit AA behavior continuously. Additionally, our findings suggest the potential for identifying subgroups based on task performance and physiological measures (such as skin conductance level). Exploratory analyses further reveal associations between individual differences and behavioral outcomes, providing insights into the variability of AA strategies across participants.