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

Higher trait anxiety in two general population samples (original n=277; replication n=279) is linked to more optimal perceptual choices and greater reliance on sensory information.

• Why it matters: Prior work testing single traits has produced contradictory findings about how psychological traits shape perceptual inference, especially separating decision from learning processes.
• What they did: Participants completed tasks with explicitly communicated or implicitly learned priors, and computational modelling separated decision and learning stages; anxious, autistic, and schizotypal traits were analysed in a pre-registered design.
• The result: Anxiety-related effects were specific to decision-stage reliance on sensory information (and state anxiety reduced sensory influence on response speed), while autistic and schizotypal traits showed no consistent effects and learning parameters were unchanged.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.