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Magnetoencephalography data from participants with high and low trait anxiety reveals a potential role for oscillations in the anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex in anxiety-associated learning.

Clinical and subclinical (trait) anxiety impairs decision making and interferes with learning. Less understood are the effects of temporary anxious states on learning and decision making in healthy populations, and whether these can serve as a model for clinical anxiety. Here we test whether anxious states in healthy individuals elicit a pattern of aberrant behavioural, neural, and physiological responses comparable with those found in anxiety disorders—particularly when processing uncertainty in unstable environments. In our study, both a state anxious and a control group learned probabilistic stimulus-outcome mappings in a volatile task environment while we recorded their electrophysiological (EEG) signals. By using a hierarchical Bayesian model of inference and learning, we assessed the effect of state anxiety on Bayesian belief updating with a focus on uncertainty estimates. State anxiety was associated with an underestimation of environmental uncertainty, and informational uncertainty about the reward tendency. Anxious individuals’ beliefs about reward contingencies were more precise (had smaller uncertainty) and thus more resistant to updating, ultimately leading to impaired reward-based learning. State anxiety was also associated with greater uncertainty about volatility. We interpret this pattern as evidence that state anxious individuals are less tolerant to informational uncertainty about the contingencies governing their environment and more willing to be uncertain about the level of stability of the world itself. Further, we tracked the neural representation of belief update signals in the trial-by-trial EEG amplitudes. In control participants, lower-level precision-weighted prediction errors (pwPEs) about reward tendencies were represented in the ERP signals across central and parietal electrodes peaking at 496 ms, overlapping with the late P300 in classical ERP analysis. The state anxiety group did not exhibit a significant representation of low-level pwPEs, and there were no significant differences between the groups. Smaller variance in low-level pwPE about reward tendencies in state anxiety could partially account for the null results. Expanding previous computational work on trait anxiety, our findings establish that temporary anxious states in healthy individuals impair reward-based learning in volatile environments, primarily through changes in uncertainty estimates, which play a central role in current Bayesian accounts of perceptual inference and learning.

Anxiety influences how the brain estimates and responds to uncertainty. The consequences of these processes on behaviour have been described in theoretical and empirical studies, yet the associated neural correlates remain unclear. Rhythm-based accounts of Bayesian predictive coding propose that predictions in generative models of perception are represented in alpha (8–12 Hz) and beta oscillations (13–30 Hz). Updates to predictions are driven by prediction errors weighted by precision (inverse variance) encoded in gamma oscillations (>30 Hz) and associated with the suppression of beta activity. We tested whether state anxiety alters the neural oscillatory activity associated with predictions and precision-weighted prediction errors (pwPE) during learning. Healthy human participants performed a probabilistic reward-based learning task in a volatile environment. In our previous work, we described learning behaviour in this task using a hierarchical Bayesian model, revealing more precise (biased) beliefs about the tendency of the reward contingency in state anxiety, consistent with reduced learning in this group. The model provided trajectories of predictions and pwPEs for the current study, allowing us to assess their parametric effects on the time-frequency representations of EEG data. Using convolution modelling for oscillatory responses, we found that, relative to a control group, state anxiety increased beta activity in frontal and sensorimotor regions during processing of pwPE, and in fronto-parietal regions during encoding of predictions. No effects of state anxiety on gamma modulation were found. Our findings expand prior evidence on the oscillatory representations of predictions and pwPEs into the reward-based learning domain. The results suggest that state anxiety modulates beta-band oscillatory correlates of pwPE and predictions in generative models, providing insights into the neural processes associated with biased belief updating and poorer learning.