Iowa Gambling Task Bechara 1994
The Iowa gambling task is a psychological task thought to simulate real-life decision-making.It was introduced by Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Anderson (1994), then researchers at the University of Iowa. It has been brought to popular attention by Antonio Damasio, proponent of the Somatic Marker Hypothesis and author of Descartes' Error. The task is sometimes known as Bechara's Gambling Task, and is widely used in research of cognition and emotion.
Participants are presented with 4 virtual decks of cards on a computer screen. They are told that each time they choose a card they will win some game money. Every so often, however, when they choose a card they will win money, but will also lose some money too. The goal of the game is to win as much money as possible. Every card drawn will earn the participant a reward ($100 for Decks A and B; $50 for Decks C and D). Occasionally, a card will also have a penalty (A and B have an total penalty of $1250 for every ten cards; C and D have a total penalty of $250 for every ten cards). Thus, A and B are 'bad decks', and C and D are 'good decks', because Decks A or B will lead to losses over the long run, and Decks C or D will lead to gains. Deck A differs from B and Deck C differs from D in the number of trials over which the losses are distributed: A and C have five smaller loss cards for every ten cards; B and D have one larger loss card for every ten cards.
Most healthy participants sample cards from each deck, and after about 40 or 50 selections are fairly good at sticking to the good decks. Patients with orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) dysfunction, however, continue to perseverate with the bad decks, sometimes even though they know that they are losing money overall. Concurrent measurement of galvanic skin response shows that healthy participants show a 'stress' reaction to hovering over the bad decks after only 10 trials, long before conscious sensation that the decks are bad. By contrast, patients with OFC dysfunction never develop this physiological reaction to impending punishment. Bechara and his colleagues explain this in terms of the somatic marker hypothesis. The Iowa gambling task is currently being used by a number of research groups using fMRI to investigate which brain regions are activated by the task in healthy volunteers as well as clinical groups with conditions such as schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder.
References[edit edit source]
Iowa Gambling Task Online
Bechara A, Damasio AR, Damasio H, Anderson SW (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition, 50: 7-15.
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Designed in 1994, the Iowa gambling task (IGT) has become one of the most complicated tasks used to study executive functions and emotionally driven decision making under uncertainty (Bechara et al., 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000). The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara et al, 1994) was designed to assess risk preferences by simulating real-life decision making using uncertainty, rewards, and penalties. The task is sometimes known as Bechara's Gambling Task, and is widely used in research of cognition and emotion. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994) is often used to assess decision-making deficits in clinical populations.
Cognitive Psychology:Attention · Decision making ·Learning · Judgement ·Memory · Motivation · Perception · Reasoning ·Thinking -Cognitive processesCognition -OutlineIndex
External links[edit edit source]
Iowa Gambling Task Bechara 1994 Episode
A free implementation of the Iowa Gambling task is available as part of the PEBL Project[1]
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A decision task designed to simulate real-life decision-making. On each trial the decision maker chooses a card from one of four decks, each choice resulting in a fixed gain of $100 for any card from two of the decks or $50 for any card from the other two, although the decision maker is not told this. For some cards, the decision maker also suffers a loss. Losses total $1,250 for every ten cards in two of the decks and $250 for every ten cards in the other two. These gains and losses are arranged so that two of the decks yield substantial expected losses and the other two substantial expected gains over every run of 10 cards, but there are sharp differences between short-term and long-term payoffs, small losses occurring relatively frequently in some decks and larger but less frequent losses occurring in others. The task was introduced by the Canadian neuroscientist Antoine Bechara (born 1961) and published with three colleagues in the journal Cognition in 1994, where it was shown that people with damage to the prefrontal cortex, in contrast to neurologically undamaged participants in their control group, performed badly, failing to consider the future consequences of their actions and being guided only by immediate prospects. See also somatic marker hypothesis. IGT abbrev. [So-called because the researchers who developed it were at the University of Iowa at the time]