The adaptive value of behavioral inhibition

Abstract

To effectively pursue goals, agents often must learn how approaching their goals feels to streamline their path. When finally reaching an actual goal, the sensory cues experienced immediately before become new targets for the agent’s future pursuits. Even if adaptively sound, this process has its drawbacks. Cues regularly paired with goals but occasionally leading to diverting paths can trap agents in systematic setbacks, ultimately undermining goal attainment — a phenomenon known as proxy failure. These misleading cues constitute an evolutionary pressure potentially driving the emergence of supporting mechanisms to disengage from counterproductive pursuits. Behavioral inhibition — the capacity to suppress an otherwise occurring action — is a suitable candidate for this role, and, importantly, it can be materialized through different execution pathways. The present paper explores a plausible environmental constraint leading to proxy failure through simulation and demonstrates how a simple implementation of behavioral inhibition can rescue effective goal pursuit.