Anticipatory anxiety promotes satisficing during multi-cue probabilistic decision making

Abstract

Critical real-life choices involve making complex decisions in the presence of potential threats, for instance, in medical or military emergencies. Effective choices require a decision maker to efficiently weigh and combine multiple sources of uncertain information. As anxiety can disrupt cognitive performance, complex decision-making under uncertainty may be particularly compromised by potential threat. One way people overcome such cognitive limitations is to “satisfice” by selectively evaluating a subset of available information to quickly identify a goodenough, feasible solution. How satisficing decision-making plays out under anxiety, however, remains elusive. Here, we examined how healthy participants solve a multi-cue probabilistic classification task under anticipatory anxiety induced via a threat-of-shock manipulation. Specifically, we investigated individual differences in information (cue) usage based on participants’ physiological responsiveness to threat, quantified by changes in skin conductance levels. In the absence of threat, all participants performed near-optimally, appropriately weighing and integrating all available cue information to guide their choices. Under threat-of-shock, however, participants who displayed high levels of anxiety employed a satisficing heuristic by ignoring the least important cue from their decision process, a strategy that uses less cognitive resources without sacrificing much accuracy. Moreover, anticipatory anxiety uncoupled the actual cue usage from explicit task knowledge. Taken together, these results suggest that, to cope with high levels of anticipatory anxiety, people satisfice by prioritizing high-value information to achieve fast and good-enough solutions.

Threat-Induced Alterations in Cognition and Associations with Dysregulated Behavior

“…These findings are consistent with previous interpretations that exposure to threat (especially predictable threats) induces heightened vigilance and quick decision making (Starcke & Brand, 2012, Yu, 2016. Because our task was relatively easy (average accuracy of 97%), this strategy was "good enough" to result in adequate performance (Oh-Descher, Tanaka, LaBar, Ferrari, Sommer, & Egner, 2019). However, decision making in real life is complex; thus, it is unclear the extent to which this strategy would be as effective in real-world scenarios.…”

Threat‐induced alterations in cognition and associations with dysregulated behavior

“…These findings are consistent with previous interpretations that exposure to threat (especially predictable threat) induces heightened vigilance and quick decision‐making (Qi & Gao, 2020; Shackman et al, 2011; Starcke & Brand, 2012; Verona et al, 2002). Because our task was relatively easy (average accuracy of 97%), this strategy was “good enough” to result in adequate performance (Oh‐Descher et al, 2019). At the same time, this state of generally heightened processing might have been effective in terms of flanker processing and performance when the threat was relatively predictable (more acute/imminent threat) but was arguably detrimental during exposure to unpredictable threat.…”