Threat impairs flexible use of a cognitive map

Goal-directed behavior requires adaptive systems that respond to environmental demands. In the absence of threat (or presence of reward), individuals are free to explore a large number of behavioral trajectories, effectively interrogating the environment across many dimensions. This leads to flexible, relational memory encoding and retrieval. In the presence of imminent danger, motivation shifts to an imperative state characterized by a narrow focus of attention on threatening information. This impairs flexible, relational memory. Here, we test how these proposed motivational shifts (Murty & Adcock, 2017) affect behavioral flexibility and memory in an ecologically valid setting. Participants learned the structure of a maze-like environment and navigated to the location of everyday objects in both safe and threatening contexts. The latter contained a predator that could ‘capture’ participants, leading to electric shock. After learning, the path to some objects was unpredictably blocked, forcing a detour for which one route was significantly shorter. We predicted that the threatening environment would push participants toward an imperative state, leading to less efficient and less flexible navigation. Across 3 studies, we found that threat caused participants to take longer paths to goal objects and less efficient detours when obstacles were encountered. A critical control analysis revealed that the threat-related impairment in detour navigation persisted even after controlling for non-detour navigation performance, and that non-detour navigation was not a reliable predictor of detour navigation. This suggests a specific impairment in flexible navigation during detours, an impairment that cannot be explained by more general processes like predator avoidance or divided attention, which may be present during non-detour navigation. These results provide ecologically valid evidence that imperative states, triggered by a dynamic, observable threat, reduce the ability to flexibly use cognitive maps to guide in-the-moment behavior.