Sustaining Control and Agency Under Threat: Computational Pathways to Persistence and Escape

Adaptive behavior requires deciding when to persist and when to disengage under uncertainty and partial outcome control. Avoidance has often been studied as a response to threat or cost, yet existing paradigms cannot disentangle whether disengagement reflects threat sensitivity, expected failure, or reduced perceived control. We introduce a persistence-escape paradigm that independently manipulates incentive structures, effort demands, and outcome controllability. In a large online sample (N = 457), we show that avoidance is context-dependent rather than a stable, global trait. When outcome control was preserved under threat, the typical avoidance response reversed, promoting persistence rather than withdrawal. At the individual level, high-performing individuals were not uniformly more persistent, but more selective, disengaging when control was low. Moreover, higher anxiety symptoms were linked to cost-dominant evaluation and reduced use of accumulated competence. Conversely, higher depressive symptoms were linked to diminished sensitivity to effort and higher expected failure. To explain these behavioral patterns, we developed the Meta-Arbitration of Control and Agency Q-learning (MACA-Q) model, which embeds value learning and affective evaluation within a meta-control architecture. Critically, we formalize agency as a dynamically inferred learning gate, distinct from self-efficacy, that determines whether outcomes are treated as informative based on controllability and feedback reliability. The model explains context-specific avoidance and reveals that similar behaviors can arise from distinct computational pathways. It further shows how experience in failure-safe contexts guides subsequent behavior in adverse contexts. Our findings show that avoidance is guided by the dynamic regulation of engagement based on inferred controllability and competence. By combining a novel paradigm with a computational model, we provide a formal account of agency and a unifying framework in which meta-control regulates adaptive and maladaptive engagement across contexts, with implications for neuroscience, psychiatry, and adaptive artificial intelligence.