ArticleMolecular psychiatry2022
A neural and behavioral trade-off between value and uncertainty underlies exploratory decisions in normative anxiety.
Article in Molecular psychiatry, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 48 citations in OpenAlex.
- A review on exploration-exploitation trade-off in psychiatric disorders.BMC psychiatry · 2025Pooled it
- Acetylcholine and noradrenaline enhance foraging optimality in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Trial
- Expectations regarding transitioning into long-term care, social connectedness, and mental health of older adults.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2026Observational
- Attenuated learning rates for negative outcomes in substance use disorders: A replication and extension of prior longitudinal computational modeling results.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2026Article
- Neural mechanisms of uncertain decision-making in anxious adolescents: an EEG study based on the balloon analogue risk task.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Article
- Directed exploration is reduced by an aversive interoceptive state induction in healthy individuals but not in those with affective disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Distinct Computational Mechanisms of Uncertainty Processing Explain Opposing Exploratory Behaviors in Anxiety and Apathy.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Article
- Estimation-uncertainty affects decisions with and without learning opportunities.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Influence of Spatial Distance and Trade-Off Salience on Ethical Decision-Making: An Eye-Tracking Study Based on Embodied Cognition.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Unraveling the Intricacies of Curiosity: A Comprehensive Study of Its Measures in the Chinese Context.PsyCh journal · 2025Article
- Directed exploration is reduced by an aversive interoceptive state induction in healthy individuals but not in those with affective disorders.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Information seeking and the expected utility of information about COVID-19 can be associated with uncertainty and related attitudes.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Computational Mechanisms of Information-Seeking in Anxiety.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- A causal role of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in random exploration.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Reviewing explore/exploit decision-making as a transdiagnostic target for psychosis, depression, and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Multiple and subject-specific roles of uncertainty in reward-guided decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- You are How You Eat: Foraging Behavior as a Potential Novel Marker of Rat Affective State.Affective science · 2024Article
- Heterogeneity in strategy use during arbitration between experiential and observational learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Interindividual Brain and Behavior Differences in Adaptation to Unexpected Uncertainty.Biology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Exploration reduces uncertainty about the environment and improves the quality of future decisions, but at the cost of provisional uncertain and suboptimal outcomes. Although anxiety promotes intolerance to uncertainty, it remains unclear whether and by which mechanisms anxiety relates to exploratory decision-making. We use a dynamic three-armed-bandit task and find that higher trait-anxiety is associated with increased exploration, which in turn harms overall performance. We identify two distinct behavioral sources: first, decisions made by anxious individuals are guided toward reduction of uncertainty; and second, decisions are less guided by immediate value gains. These findings are similar in both loss and gain domains, and further demonstrate that an affective trait relates to exploration and results in an inverse-U-shaped relationship between anxiety and overall performance. Additional imaging data (fMRI) suggests that normative anxiety correlates negatively with the representation of expected-value in the dorsal-anterior-cingulate-cortex, and in contrast, positively with the representation of uncertainty in the anterior-insula. We conclude that a trade-off between value-gains and uncertainty-reduction entails maladaptive decision-making in individuals with higher normal-range anxiety.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.