Events

International Lecture Series

July 23rd, 2025, 4:15-5:45 pm, online: Ondřej Zika & Luianta Verra - Computational mechanisms of contextual inference and aversive generalization in anxiety 

Abstract:

Recent work has associated anxiety with anomalous learning and inference in aversive uncertain situations. In this talk I will focus on two specific mechanisms: contextual inference and generalization. In the first part, I will discuss how anxiety impacts inference of hidden structures in ambiguous environments and how this might relate to increased rates of return-of-fear. I will also discuss the possibility that anxious individuals might sometimes learn structures that do not in fact exist, such as by generating overfitting hypotheses to explain observations. 

In the second part, I will discuss the role of anxiety in aversive generalisation, presenting our recent results on dissociating perceptual from value-based mechanism in generalization. 

Finally, I will discuss the results in the context of the role of intolerance of uncertainty in anxiety.

Please e-mail to klinische.psych"AT"uni-hamburg.de for all requests related to the lecture series, including requests for the Zoom link to online lectures.