Disentangling the effects of Anxious, Autistic and Schizotypal Traits on Perceptual Inference

Perception combines sensory information with prior knowledge, but people differ in how they do so. These differences may be associated with psychological traits; however, previous studies often focused on one trait at a time and yielded contradictory results. We measured how anxious, autistic and schizotypal traits relate to perception in two general population samples (original: n=277; replication: n=279, pre-registered). We combined tasks in which priors were either explicitly communicated or implicitly learnt with computational modelling to distinguish the decision and learning stages of perceptual inference. The three traits formed distinct but correlated dimensions. At the decision stage, higher trait anxiety was associated with more optimal choices and greater reliance on sensory information, without any alteration in the reliance on priors, whether explicit or implicit. On the other hand, state anxiety was associated with a reduced effect of sensory information on response speed. When traits were analysed separately, autistic traits showed similar associations, but these associations disappeared once anxiety was taken into account in multidimensional analyses. No other credible or consistent effects emerged for autistic or schizotypal traits, nor for learning parameters. These results highlight the importance of a multidimensional approach, including anxiety measurements, to characterise inter-individual differences in perception.