Spatial navigation is a core adaptive function, especially when individuals must rapidly reverse routes to escape potential danger. Across three virtual reality studies, we investigated whether anticipatory threat enhances or impairs navigation as a function of individual differences in trait anxiety. In Study 1 (N = 48), participants performed route-repetition and route-retracing tasks in a virtual urban environment under conditions of safety or threat of electric shock, embedded in day- and night-like contexts. A significant interaction emerged between trait anxiety and threat manipulation: under threat, low-anxious individuals exhibited reduced route-retracing performance, whereas high-anxious individuals showed improved performance. Study 2 (N = 30) examined the replicability of this pattern in an immersive VR paradigm using a Meta Quest 3 headset combined with mobile EEG recording. Consistent with Study 1, high-anxious participants navigated more efficiently under threat, reflected in shorter decision times without compromising accuracy. This facilitation effect was not restricted to route-retracing but extended to route-repetition trials. An ongoing MEG investigation (Study 3; N = 49) probes the neural mechanisms underlying these effects in healthy participants and individuals with anxiety and trauma-related disorders. Collectively, the findings challenge a purely deficit-oriented view of anxiety. In ecologically valid threat contexts, elevated trait anxiety may bias cognitive processing toward action-relevant environmental cues, thereby enhancing navigation efficiency and supporting adaptive defensive behavior.

The transition from childhood to adolescence is marked by significant changes in fear and anxiety. One possible mechanism underlying these developmental changes is threat learning, which relates to the ability to differentiate safety from danger. Threat learning can occur both through direct experience and vicariously by observing others, and both are suggested to contribute to the development and expression of fear. While these two pathways share similarities, they may rely on distinct underlying mechanisms, with observational threat learning involving additional social-cognitive processes compared to its direct counterpart. This, in turn, may lead to differential impacts on the expression of threat and safety responses, as well as on anxiety levels. Moreover, these differences between the pathways may further change across development, partly due to the maturation of relevant social and cognitive processes from childhood to adolescence. Interestingly, developmental research on threat learning has largely examined each pathway separately, leaving their similarities and differences relatively underexplored. In the present study, children and adolescents complete both direct and observational threat learning tasks to examine how these pathways compare within individuals in terms of conditional responses and their relationship with anxiety. Throughout each task, participants undergo acquisition, generalization, extinction, and extinction recall phases. Preliminary results comparing these two pathways across development and their associations with anxiety will be presented.

By relying on the observation of others’ experiences, humans learn about threat while avoiding harmful experiences. Yet, previous neuroscience research has focused on observational threats that are predictable, while the neurobiological distinction between temporally predictable (cued) and unpredictable (contextual) threats has been well-characterized in firsthand learning. In this study, we developed a novel observational learning paradigm in which participants socially learned from predictable and unpredictable threats observed in others.

Based on previous studies on firsthand and observational learning, participants were shown videos in which a demonstrator is exposed to dynamic cues and contexts associated with temporally predictable (P) and unpredictable (U) inflicted pain, respectively. In a second phase participants encounter the same cues and contexts in an expression phase and rate their expectation of receiving pain. Behavioral results from Experiment 1 (N=20) were replicated in Experiment 2 (N=25) while undergoing fMRI.

Participants successfully learned threat contingencies by observation in both experiments, showing heightened threat expectations for predictable cues and unpredictable contexts. This converged with neural responses in the anterior insula during the expression phase. Reflecting the dynamic process of learning, the amygdala responded to predictable threat cues with a linear decrease across trials. Interestingly, we found that responses to others’ pain was enhanced within the amygdala, insula and hippocampus, when participants could learn to predict threats, as compared to unpredictable pain in others.

Our findings suggest that humans learn to resolve temporal uncertainty, relying on observation, which lays a foundation to the concept of fear and anxiety in social groups.

Observational threat learning facilitates the acquisition of threat expectations from others' aversive experiences. However, inferences about observed outcomes in naturalistic settings are inherently variable. In order to examine how variability shapes learning and threat prediction, an observational learning paradigm was utilised. Participants observed a demonstrator receiving painful stimulation that varied in intensity: low variance (CS+ narrow), high variance (CS+ wide), or no stimulation (CS−). In a subsequent test phase, these same cues were predictive of a first-hand aversive electrical stimulation of medium unpleasantness.

We show that pupillometric responses during observation differed across conditions, suggesting psychophysiological sensitivity to social outcomes under uncertainty. In the test phase, pupil responses will be examined in relation to trial-wise discrepancies between expected and experienced outcomes to assess their potential sensitivity to prediction error signals. Visual gaze patterns demonstrated that participants predominantly focused on socially relevant cues, particularly the demonstrator's face, across all conditions.

Together, Pupil-linked sympathetic arousal as well as gaze patterns may offer insights into the mechanisms of aversive social learning and the integration of threat expectations in uncertain environments.

Little is known about how observational learning and first-hand experiences are integrated to shape expectations and the perception of aversive outcomes in the future. Previous studies suggest that inferences do not only depend on the perceived aversiveness of the demonstrator’s response, but also on the variability of information. To experimentally manipulate variability of information, we use an observational learning paradigm in which three different visual cues are associated with different variances (CS+wide vs. CS+narrow) around the same mean unpleasantness of observed breathing restrictions or no breathing restrictions (CS-). During a subsequent test phase, observers were presented with the same visual cues that were then paired with a first-hand breathing restriction of medium unpleasantness. Effects are assessed at the subjective and psychophysiological level (i.e. SCR, FPS). Preliminary results (N= 76) suggest that expectations during observational learning and the first-hand experiences were modulated by the observational learning conditions (wide vs. narrow vs. safe). Moreover, during the first-hand experiences of breathing restrictions, we found higher autonomic arousal in response to CS+wide as compared to CS+narrow, while autonomic arousal in response to both CS+wide and CS+narrow was greater as compared to CS-. Although we also found greater defensive mobilization in response to CS+wide and CS+narrow relative to CS- during the first-hand experiences, no difference in defensive mobilization emerged between CS+wide and CS+narrow. In sum, the findings of the present suggest that inferences about the unpleasantness of observed breathing restrictions also seem to be modulated by the variability of information .