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THEORY-1180: In foraging tasks, higher stress or anxiety goes consistently with less exploration, and in one task with a predator to check for, people higher in somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, a reduction associated with greater aversion to detecting the predator

2 min read

Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagspsychopathology-and-treatment, learning-and-conditioning, emotion-and-affect
SourceLIT-1483 — The influence of anxiety on exploration: A review of computational modeling studies
ExtendsTHEORY-907 — As Chou, Wilson and Smith review them, in about six foraging studies, mostly sub-clinical, higher stress or anxiety went with less exploration, and in one task with a predator to check for (Trier et al. 2023), people higher in trait somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, a reduction the study's further analyses associated with greater aversion to detecting the predator
Bears onQUESTION-330 — How does anxiety change exploration across tasks and facets: does it reduce foraging exploration once stress and effort cost are controlled, does somatic anxiety reduce checking for threat through aversion to detecting it rather than a lower value placed on the information, and, in the same participants across more than one bandit task, does directed exploration rise with trait or cognitive anxiety and fall with state or somatic anxiety?

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Source

Chou, Wilson & Smith (preprint June 2024; NBR 2024), LIT-1483, read in full from the PsyArXiv preprint in NOTE-1127. The primary studies were not read. What the review reports of about six foraging studies and of Trier et al. (2023) is THEORY-907, which this entry extends.

The claim

The review concludes that “foraging-related exploration is deterred in those with high anxiety, perhaps due to risk aversion and/or pessimistic expectations” (p. 28). Its studies agree in direction: acute and chronic stress kept foragers in depleting patches too long, generalized anxiety went with less exploration when leaving cost effort and with less adjustment to volatility, and anxious people in human open-field and plus- maze studies kept to the walls and the closed arms. NOTE-1127 records this as claim C3, moderate.

In a foraging task with a predator, people higher in trait somatic anxiety checked less and did worse, and the reduction in checking was associated with a greater aversion to detecting the predator (Trier et al. 2023, as the review reports it; claim C4, weak: one study).

Stated as a regularity of foraging tasks, this is wider than what the review shows, which is a consistent direction across a handful of mostly sub-clinical studies that treat stress and anxiety together.

What would settle it

The promote_when, carried from THEORY-907 unchanged: a replicated study, clinical as well as sub-clinical, that separates anxiety from stress and effort cost in foraging, and a replication of the checking result that shows, by modelling or manipulation, that the reduction comes from aversion to detection. QUESTION-330 asks the same.

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