Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In economics, “willingness to pay” reflects subjective value which has been employed to price goods, and morerecently, negative outcomes. The current project proposes a protocol for the behavioural assessment of fear-related avoidancebased on how much an individual is willing to pay to avoid their fears.The proposed protocol consists of a “card game” interface in which participants make choices in several stages. Duringbaseline, participants chose between two decks that provide differential point rewards. Across a series of experimental blocks,feared stimuli (e.g. a spider image) were presented in addition to rewards when the richer deck was chosen. Rewards were thenmanipulated, in a staircase fashion, to establish the value of the feared stimulus. Mouse and eye movements were tracked inan attempt to track cognitive processes during decision-making and avoidance. Preliminary results indicate sensitivity of theprotocol, and strengths and weaknesses will be discussed.