Absence of Systematic Effects of Internalizing Psychopathology on Learning Under Uncertainty

Abstract

Difficulties in adapting learning to meet the challenges of uncertain and changing environments are widely thought to play a central role in internalizing psychopathology, including anxiety and depression. This view stems from findings linking trait anxiety and transdiagnostic internalizing symptoms to learning impairments in laboratory tasks often used as proxies for real-world behavioral flexibility. These tasks typically require learners to adjust learning rates dynamically in response to uncertainty, for instance, increasing learning from prediction errors in volatile environments. However, prior studies have produced inconsistent and sometimes contradictory findings regarding the nature and extent of learning impairments in populations with internalizing disorders. To address this, we conducted eight experiments (N = 820) using predictive inference and reversal learning tasks, and applied a bi-factor analysis to capture internalizing symptom variance shared across and differentiated between anxiety and depression. While we observed robust evidence for adaptive learning-rate modulation across participants, we found no convincing evidence of a systematic relationship between internalizing symptoms and either learning rates or task performance. These findings challenge prominent claims that learning difficulties are a hallmark feature of internalizing psychopathology and suggest that the relationship between these traits and adaptive behavior under uncertainty may be more subtle than previously thought.