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THEORY-1182: Across seven computational learning studies selected without a systematic search, anxiety goes with altered adjustment of learning rate to uncertainty, mostly for aversive outcomes, while overall learning rate, choice consistency and outcome valuation show little relation to it

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Properties5
StatusProposed
Tagspsychopathology-and-treatment, learning-and-conditioning
SourceLIT-1479 — Anxiety as a disorder of uncertainty: implications for understanding maladaptive anxiety, anxious avoidance, and exposure therapy
ExtendsTHEORY-897 — In Brown, Price and Dombrovski's reading of seven computational learning studies they selected without a systematic search, with mixed directions, anxiety goes with altered adjustment of learning rate to uncertainty, mostly for aversive outcomes, while overall learning rate, choice consistency and outcome valuation show little relation to it
Bears onQUESTION-329 — In people with fear-based anxiety disorders against controls, does a systematic search with meta-analysis, or a large preregistered study, find that what differs is the adjustment of learning rate to the kind of uncertainty, noise against volatility, mainly for aversive outcomes, while overall learning rate, choice consistency and outcome valuation do not?

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Source

Brown, Price & Dombrovski (2023; preprint 2022), LIT-1479, read in full from the NIH author manuscript in NOTE-1120. The record read their Table 2 and the synthesis drawn from it, not the seven studies. The authors’ reading of those studies is THEORY-897, which this entry extends.

The claim

The authors conclude from the seven studies they tabulate, in samples with some clinical-level fear-based anxiety, that anxiety shows up in the parameters for how learning adjusts to uncertainty (associability, volatility adjustment, latent-state formation), and mostly for losses, while “other parameters measuring overall learning rate, choice consistency, and outcome valuation show little relationship with anxiety”. NOTE-1120 records this as their claim C2, moderate to weak: the studies were chosen without a systematic search and the directions are mixed.

This entry states that pattern as a property of the studies, which the record has not checked study by study. It does not carry the authors’ further reading, that anxiety is a failure to tell noise from change.

What would settle it

The promote_when, carried from THEORY-897 unchanged: a systematic search with a meta-analysis, or a large preregistered study, in people with fear- based anxiety disorders against controls. QUESTION-329 asks the same. More single studies chosen from the authors’ knowledge of the literature cannot settle it.

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