Anxiety biases task generalization

Adaptive behavior depends on generalizing learned task structures to novel situations. While anxiety is known to distort stimulus-based threat generalization, its effects on task generalization—the transfer of learned action-outcome structures to new planning contexts—remain poorly understood. We developed an online navigation paradigm where participants learned to control vehicles defined by latent task categories, each with unique transition dynamics. Critically, one task category was incidentally paired with a goal-relevant threat: potential negative social evaluation. Across two studies (N=21, N=30), participants successfully generalized latent task structure above chance. However, individuals high in trait worry exhibited systematic under-generalization specifically for threat-paired task categories, despite easily avoiding threat-related obstacles during learning. This bias manifested as reduced reuse of threat-associated action patterns when generalizing, and differentially impaired performance: worry predicted worse generalization for threat-related versus safe tasks. Importantly, this under-generalization could not be explained by direct reinforcement history or general performance deficits. These findings demonstrate that anxiety distorts not only threat perception but also the task representations used to pursue goals. When actions coincidentally co-occur with potential threat in goal-relevant domains—particularly those involving punishment avoidance such as social evaluation—anxious individuals may exclude those behavioral strategies from future task models.