Behavioral elements and neural circuits underlying exploratory decisions in normative anxiety

Exploration reduces uncertainty about the environment and improves the quality of future decisions, but at the cost of provisional uncertain and suboptimal outcomes. Although anxiety promotes intolerance to uncertainty, it remains unclear whether and by which mechanisms anxiety modulates exploratory decision-making. We use a dynamic three-armed-bandit task and find that higher trait-anxiety increases exploration, which in turn harms overall performance. We identify two distinct behavioral sources: first, decisions made by anxious individuals were guided towards reduction of uncertainty; and second, decisions were less guided by immediate value gains. Imaging (fMRI) revealed that anxiety correlated negatively with the representation of expected-value in the dorsal-anterior-cingulate-cortex, and in contrast, positively with the representation of uncertainty in the anterior-insula. Moreover, the findings were similar in both loss and gain domains, and demonstrated that affective trait modulates exploration and results in an inverse-U-shaped relationship between anxiety and overall performance. We conclude that a shift in balance towards representation of uncertainty in the insula prevails over reduced value representation in the dACC, and entails maladaptive decision-making in individuals with higher normal-range anxiety.