Anxiety is known to affect cognitive processes and learning. Studies have shown that people with anxiety tend to be biased towards negative feedback and learn better from it. This phenomenon has...Show moreAnxiety is known to affect cognitive processes and learning. Studies have shown that people with anxiety tend to be biased towards negative feedback and learn better from it. This phenomenon has been studied in reinforcement learning, but its effect on less known structure learning has not yet been studied. Structure learning refers to inferring the structure of an ambiguous environment to which reinforcement learning adds reward values on. This research paper aims to investigate if bias towards negative feedback caused by high level of trait anxiety found in reinforcement learning is also present in structure learning. We measured reinforcement learning and structure learning capacities with three well-known and validated tasks and trait anxiety with the STAI-T questionnaire in 48 students. Negative feedback bias was quantified via the win-stay-lose-shift behaviour. Using simple linear regression analyses, we found no significant effects of trait anxiety on negative feedback bias in reinforcement and structure learning tasks. Using moderation analysis in exploratory data analysis we found no significant results of the level of trait anxiety moderating the relationship between performance in the tasks and various independent variables. This could be due to the limitations of this study, for example using a behavioural instead of a neural measure to measure negative feedback bias, which raises a question of whether behavioural measures are sensitive enough to measure negative feedback bias in trait anxiety.Show less
