Schedule of Events | Symposia

Neural correlates of anxiety and perfectionism during reinforcement learning under imperative vs. interrogative motivation

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Jacqueline Bao¹ (jackie.bao@duke.edu), Yuxi Candice Wang¹, Alyssa H. Sinclair², R. Alison Adcock¹; ¹Duke University, ²University of Pennsylvania

Motivated behaviors reflect distinct neural mechanisms, influencing downstream consequences for learning and memory. Imperative motivation helps address urgent goals and immediate actions but leads to sparse memories. Interrogative motivation fosters exploration and information seeking behavior for longer term goals, supporting the formation of expansive long-term memories. We investigated how individual differences in anxiety and perfectionism under imperative vs. interrogative motivational states might influence learning and memory outcomes and their relations to underlying neural substrates. Participants (N = 58) were randomly assigned to read a cover story to induce either imperative or interrogative motivation (“executing” or “planning”, respectively). They then completed the same reinforcement learning task in an fMRI, repeatedly choosing among four doors to reveal trial-unique images paired with reward values. Incidental memory for these images and their associated reward values were assessed the following day. We replicated findings that the imperative group made more optimal choices during reinforcement learning, whereas the interrogative group showed better memory recognition of the images. Within the interrogative group, higher trait perfectionism was associated with making more optimal choices, and higher state anxiety was associated with impaired memory performance, exhibiting behavioral similarities as the imperative group. fMRI results for the interrogative group revealed that higher perfectionism correlated with greater amygdala and hippocampus activation during decision-making, and higher state anxiety correlated with greater amygdala activation for remembered items. These findings highlight the influence of psychological traits in shaping the neuro-cognitive impacts of goal-driven behaviors and learning contexts.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions