Fig. 1: Task design.
From: Trait anxiety is associated with reduced reward-related replay at rest
On Day 1, during a structure learning phase, participants were trained on the mapping rule between the order of stimuli presentation (the visual sequence, e.g. B’ → A → D’ → B) and the task-relevant order (the true sequence, e.g. A → B → C → D) (details not shown). On Day 2, they were exposed to a new set of stimuli but followed the same mapping rule. Stimuli preferences were rated twice: once at the beginning and again at the end of the task. Participants engaged in the sequence-learning task18 while undergoing whole-brain EEG recording. During the functional-localiser phase, stimuli were presented in random order to train decoders. In the sequence-learning phase, stimuli were presented in the same manner as on Day 1, with participants required to apply the learned structure to reorder the new stimuli. Following this phase, the last stimulus of each true sequence, either D or D’, was paired with a reward or neutral icon. Finally, participants were probed on the position of all stimuli in the true sequence. There were three resting states throughout the task, used to capture spontaneous replay of the task sequences. During these resting states, participants were instructed to keep their eyes open for 4 min without engaging in any specific task.
