Alexander Guardado¹, Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco¹; ¹University of British Columbia

Feeling like we cannot escape a situation can lead us to freeze or make decisions we would not otherwise make. Where does this feeling come from? Sometimes, we can pin it down, perhaps from beliefs of helplessness and loss of control. But other times, we can feel it—the way visual illusions might be difficult to resist, despite all beliefs to the contrary. Here, we explored how subtle visual features of our immediate environment might contribute to a sense of “no escape”. Across multiple trials, subjects moved through unique virtual rooms, each time also completing a risk-taking task (i.e., the Balloon Analogue Risk Task). Subjects were incentivized to accumulate as much “money” as possible by inflating a virtual balloon, with each pump corresponding to a monetary increment. Subjects could pump the balloon as many times as they wanted, at the risk of it popping, in which case they would lose all the money earned in that trial. Critically, and in a way that was completely irrelevant to the task, rooms were rendered in pairs, where each pair’s spatial configuration was identical, except for the location of one spatial element that either created or blocked a path to the exit. Across experiments, despite subjects reporting no awareness of the key manipulation, results revealed a higher explosion rate when the rooms afforded an exit, suggesting that seeing an escape route encourages risk-taking. This influence can also be appreciated in subjects’ moment-to-moment decisions, with longer inter-pump latencies in no-escape rooms, suggesting that entrapment instead fuels more cautious behaviour. These effects held even when subjects were exposed to the room layout for only 300ms. These findings suggest that escape routes may be spontaneously and quickly extracted in visual processing—and they demonstrate how visual entrapment can shape risk-taking decisions and behaviour in a surprisingly direct way.