Anxiety is Associated With Biases in Task Generalization

Adaptive behavior depends on generalizing learned task structures to novel situations. While anxiety is known to distort stimulus-based threat generalization, its effects on task generalization—the transfer of learned action−outcome structures to new planning contexts—remain poorly understood. We developed an online navigation paradigm where participants learned to control vehicles defined by latent task categories, each with unique transition dynamics. Critically, one task category was incidentally paired with a goal-relevant threat: potential negative social evaluation. Across two studies (N = 21, N = 30), participants successfully generalized latent task structure above chance. However, individuals high in trait worry exhibited systematic undergeneralization—that is, reduced use of actions used in threat contexts—despite easily avoiding threat-related obstacles during learning. This bias differentially impaired performance: worry predicted worse generalization in new threat contexts and better performance in safe tasks. Importantly, threat undergeneralization could not be explained by direct reinforcement history or general performance deficits. These findings provide preliminary evidence that anxiety distorts not only threat perception but also the task representations used to pursue goals. When actions coincidentally co-occur with a potential threat in goal-relevant domains, anxious individuals may exclude those behavioral strategies from future task models, a hypothesis that will require confirmation in larger, preregistered samples.