PERSISTENCE AND FLEXIBILITY IN HUMAN ESCAPE BEHAVIOR

Rapid escape from an approaching threat is essential for survival. This requires devising precise cognitive and spatial plans at high speed. Contrary to commonly held beliefs, recent studies in rodents and humans suggest that escape relies on reflective planning rather than model-free actions. How this can be rapidly achieved remains unclear. In rodents, escape appears guided by offline pre-planning. Here, we developed a novel immersive virtual reality paradigm to investigate human escape planning in a dynamically changing environment. Participants (n = 36) foraged for fruit and escaped from an approaching bear into one of two equidistant shelters. These shelters could dynamically open or close upon the appearance of the bear, testing flexibility in escape route selection. When both shelters were available, escape trajectories were highly direct, and 68% of the escapes were oriented opposite to the threat, similar to rodent escape behavior. A subset of participants persistently chose the same shelter when available. Reducing action space to a single available shelter did not reduce escape initiation times relative to two-shelter trials. In trials where the initial open shelter closed and the other opened at threat onset, most participants initially ran toward the previously open shelter before curving mid-escape toward the newly available one. Our findings suggest that humans form an escape plan before threat appearance, initiating their escape without re-evaluation at threat onset. Replanning occurs during the execution rather than before, thus prioritising speed over accuracy.