Context-specific allocation of attentional control in anxiety and uncontrollability

Volatile, unpredictable environments often evoke experiences of anxiety and uncontrollability. Previous research has shown that both high trait anxiety and a perceived lack of control can negatively affect the efficiency of attentional control. In the present research, we examined a novel hypothesis: that anxiety and uncontrollability impact the learning of control allocation in a context-dependent way. We assumed that highly anxious individuals or those who experience uncontrollability would exhibit reduced attentional control because incidental learning from contextual cues is altered. In Experiment 1, we investigated how dispositional differences in anxiety relate to incidental learning from the task context, indexed by the context-specific proportion congruency (CSPC) effect. Participants scoring high (vs. low) in trait anxiety did not differ in the magnitude of the CSPC effect during the initial learning phase. However, once the association was acquired, anxious participants showed difficulties in flexibly modifying it based on new contextual information indicating that the association between proportion congruency and the context was reversed. In Experiment 2, we examined the effect of induced uncontrollability on subsequent incidental learning from contextual cues. We observed an absence of the CSPC effect during the learning phase for participants who had previously been exposed to uncontrollability. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories concerning how anxiety and a lack of control influence flexible learning about when to allocate more or less attentional control based on contextual cues.