Is human decision making under ambiguity guided by loss frequency regardless of the costs? A developmental study using the Soochow Gambling Task

Converging developmental decision-making studies have demonstrated that until late adolescence, individuals prefer options for which the risk of a loss is low regardless of the final outcome. Recent works have shown a similar inability to consider both loss frequency and final outcome among adults. The current study aimed to identify developmental changes in feedback-monitoring ability to consider both loss frequency and final outcome in decision making under ambiguity. Children, adolescents, and adults performed an adapted version of the Soochow Gambling Task. Our results showed that children and adolescents presented an exclusive preference for options associated with infrequent punishment. In contrast, only adults seemed to consider both loss frequency and the final outcome by favoring the advantageous options when the frequency of losses was low. These findings suggest that the ability to integrate both loss frequency and final outcome develops with age. Moreover, the analysis of strategic adjustments following gains and losses reveals that adults switch less often after losses compared with children and adolescents. This finding suggests that psychological tolerance to loss may facilitate learning the characteristics of each option and improve the ability to choose advantageously.     

Working memory involvement in emotion-based processes underlying choosing advantageously

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to assess decision making under conditions of uncertainty in clinical as well as in nonclinical populations. However, there is still debate as to whether normal performance at this task relies on implicit, emotion-based processes that are independent of working memory. To clarify the role of working memory on normal performance on the IGT, participants performed the task under low or high working memory load. We used a modified version of the original task, in which the position of the four decks was randomized between trials. Results showed that only participants performing under low memory load significantly chose more advantageously halfway through the task. In addition, when comparing the number of cards chosen from the two decks with frequent losses, one advantageous and one disadvantageous, only participants performing under low memory load chose more cards from the advantageous deck. The present findings indicate that the processes underlying optimal advantageous performance on the IGT rely on working memory functions.     

成瘾人群的决策障碍：研究范式与神经机制

药物成瘾者和赌博成瘾者常常偏好即刻的奖赏而忽视将来的消极结果。在进行决策任务时, 他们倾向于做出不利的选择, 偏好短时的获益而不顾长期的损失, 这是一种决策障碍的表现。延迟折扣任务(DDT)、爱荷华赌博任务(IGT)和剑桥赌博任务(CGT)是研究决策障碍的三种常用方法和范式, 分别考察成瘾人群的冲动性决策、决策短视和决策时的冒险行为。近十几年来的研究表明, 前额叶皮层(PFC)在人类的决策活动中起重要作用。其中, 腹内侧前额叶(VMPFC)、眶额叶(OFC)、背外侧前额叶(DLPFC)等皮层的功能变化与成瘾人群的决策障碍有密切关系。     

Adolescents' performance on the Iowa Gambling Task: implications for the development of decision making and ventromedial prefrontal cortex

Healthy adolescents (79 girls, 66 boys), ages 9-17, completed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; A. Bechara, A. R. Damasio, H. Damasio, & S. W. Anderson, 1994) as well as working memory (digit span) and behavioral inhibition (go/no-go) tasks. Cross-sectional age-related changes were seen on all 3 tasks. Gender differences were seen in IGT deck preference and attentional variables (i.e., go/no-go hit rate and forward digit span). After age, gender, and general intellectual abilities were controlled for, IGT performance was not predicted by working memory or behavioral inhibition scores. Findings suggest that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or its connections are functionally maturing during adolescence in a manner that can be distinguished from maturation of other prefrontal regions. Development of these functions may continue into young adulthood.     

Individual differences in need for cognition and decision making in the Iowa Gambling Task

Differences in decision making between individuals differing in Need for Cognition (NFC) are examined using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Previous work using normative one time decisions suggests that individual low in NFC process gains and losses differently than those high in NFC and are more susceptible to decision biases. The IGT is a popular laboratory task that involves making risky decisions from experience involving both gains and losses. In the first experiment, low NFC participants performed significantly worse than the high NFC participants. A second experiment designed to examine the nature of these differences provides evidence that low NFC participants place more importance on gains as opposed to losses when performing the IGT. Results are discussed in light of previous work suggesting that low NFC participants place more importance on losses in mixed outcome decisions.     

Somatic markers,working memory,and decision making

The somatic marker hypothesis formulated by Damasio (e.g., 1994; Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1991) argues that affective reactions ordinarily guide and simplify decision making. Although originally intended to explain decision-making deficits in people with specific frontal lobe damage, the hypothesis also applies to decision-making problems in populations without brain injury. Subsequently, the gambling task was developed by Bechara (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994) as a diagnostic test of decision-making deficit in neurological populations. More recently, the gambling task has been used to explore implications of the somatic marker hypothesis, as well as to study suboptimal decision making in a variety of domains. We examined relations among gambling task decision making, working memory (WM) load, and somatic markers in a modified version of the gambling task. Increased WM load produced by secondary tasks led to poorer gambling performance. Declines in gambling performance were associated with the absence of the affective reactions that anticipate choice outcomes and guide future decision making. Our experiments provide evidence that WM processes contribute to the development of somatic markers. If WM functioning is taxed, somatic markers may not develop, and decision making may thereby suffer.     

Remembering the best and worst of times: Memories for extreme outcomes bias risky decisions

When making decisions on the basis of past experiences, people must rely on their memories. Human memory has many well-known biases, including the tendency to better remember highly salient events. We propose an extreme-outcome rule, whereby this memory bias leads people to overweight the largest gains and largest losses, leading to more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses. To test this rule, in two experiments, people repeatedly chose between fixed and risky options, where the risky option led equiprobably to more or less than did the fixed option. As was predicted, people were more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses. In subsequent memory tests, people tended to recall the extreme outcome first and also judged the extreme outcome as having occurred more frequently. Across individuals, risk preferences in the risky-choice task correlated with these memory biases. This extreme-outcome rule presents a novel mechanism through which memory influences decision making.     

Neural correlates of adaptive decision making for risky gains and losses

Do decisions about potential gains and potential losses require different neural structures for advantageous choices? In a lesion study, we used a new measure of adaptive decision making under risk to examine whether damage to neural structures subserving emotion affects an individual's ability to make adaptive decisions differentially for gains and losses. We found that individuals with lesions to the amygdala, an area responsible for processing emotional responses, displayed impaired decision making when considering potential gains, but not when considering potential losses. In contrast, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area responsible for integrating cognitive and emotional information, showed deficits in both domains. We argue that this dissociation provides evidence that adaptive decision making for risks involving potential losses may be more difficult to disrupt than adaptive decision making for risks involving potential gains. This research further demonstrates the role of emotion in decision competence.     

爱荷华博弈任务(IGT)与决策的认知神经机制

爱荷华博弈任务(IGT)是一项检查情感性决策机制的常用实验范式。据此, Damasio等人提出了躯体标记假设(SMH)解释情绪影响决策的神经生理机制。近期, 大量研究在IGT究竟是模糊决策还是风险决策、与情绪和认知的关系、与工作记忆和陈述性记忆的关系以及IGT的神经网络与分子遗传机制等方面积累了丰富资料。结果显示, IGT加工的早期由模糊决策主导, 情绪性躯体信号对引导决策选项的偏好可能起关键作用, 后期则倾向是一种风险决策, 认知评价和预期对选项偏向逐渐占优势; IGT与工作记忆的加工成分有相互重叠, 也需陈述性记忆的参与; IGT的加工不仅依赖于杏仁核、腹内侧前额皮层、眶额皮层等组成的情绪脑网络的活动, 还与背外侧前额皮层、海马、腹侧纹状体、岛叶皮层、辅助运动前区、扣带回皮层等许多脑区的活动有关; COMT和5-HTT的基因多态性会调节IGT相关的决策加工。总之, IGT是一项需要多重神经系统协同活动的决策加工任务, 且模糊与风险决策可能具有不同的遗传基础。     

Developmental changes of win-stay and loss-shift strategies in decision making

This study aims to clarify the developmental changes in real-life decision making when strategy is adjusted using both positive and negative feedback, that is, whether strategic adjustment evolves with age. A total of 84 participants divided into three age groups (children, adolescents, and adults) performed the standard version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Children and adolescents showed a strong bias in favor of disadvantageous choices whereas adults learned to decide advantageously during the course of the task. Interestingly, the results clearly demonstrate that children did not switch differently following gains and losses whereas adolescents and adults switched more often after a loss than after a gain, corresponding to the “loss-shift” and the “win-stay” strategies, respectively. The results also revealed that adults switched less often after losses compared to children and adolescents and, thus, used the loss-stay strategy more often than the 2 youngest groups. These new findings suggest that successful completion of the IGT by adults requires fine feedback monitoring and more frequent use of the win-stay and loss-stay strategic adjustments.     

奖惩频率对3～5岁幼儿完成博弈任务的影响

通过对情感决策的常用研究工具——标准爱荷华博弈任务进行了得失总量不变而频率改变的修改,并使之适合于年幼的3～5岁儿童,可以比较幼儿在不同奖惩频率任务中的表现,从而考察奖惩频率对幼儿情感决策的影响。对120名3～5岁幼儿在四种不同类型的任务中的表现进行分析后,所得实验结果如下:(1)儿童对惩罚和奖励频率的变化比较敏感:正向博弈任务中,"有利纸牌不变,不利纸牌的惩罚总量不变,只增加不利纸牌的惩罚频率"可以使3～5岁儿童完成博弈任务的成绩有显著提高;逆向博弈任务中,"不利纸牌不变,有利纸牌的奖惩总量不变,而有利纸牌奖励频率的增加"能促使4～5岁幼儿更多更快地做出正确选择。(2)幼儿的情感决策能力在3～4岁时期发展迅速,而在4～5岁时仍然有较快发展。     

The uncertainty appraisal enhances the prominent deck B effect in the Iowa gambling task

The Iowa gambling task (Bechara et al., Cognition 50:7–15, 1994) is designed to simulate a decision making problem under ambiguity, in which the degree of reliance on emotional cues arising from previous experiences contributes to perform advantageously. Recent studies based on the appraisal tendency framework demonstrated that emotional certainty (associated with intuitive strategies) leads to a more advantageous decision pattern, whereas emotional uncertainty (associated with deliberative strategies) impairs the performance in the IGT (Bagneux et al., Motivation and Emotion 37(4):818–827, 2013; Bollon and Bagneux, Cognition and Emotion 27(2):376–384, 2013). Due to the problems in the IGT (Dunn et al., Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 30:239–271, 2006; Steingroever et al., Psychological Assessment 25(1):180–193, 2013), however, it is an open question to what extent the disadvantageous IGT performance in the uncertainty conditions was based on risky decision making. Addressing the main criticisms on the IGT, the primary aim of the present study is to provide a further explanation for the underlying source of the IGT impairment led by uncertainty appraisals. In line with previous research, we found that participants in the certainty-associated emotion condition (disgust) outperformed those in uncertainty-associated conditions (fear, sadness) in the gambling game. Detailed four-deck format analyses on decision patterns and knowledge levels provided supporting evidence for our main hypothesis that the weak IGT scores in the uncertainty conditions can be summarized as a failure to anticipate the badness and the goodness of the most difficult decks, and a dominant preference for a risky option with high immediate gains and infrequent losses.     

Self‐Control Moderates Decision‐Making Behavior When Minimizing Losses versus Maximizing Gains

We examined (1) whether people would be more responsive to the delayed consequences of their decisions when attempting to minimize losses than when attempting to maximize gains in a history‐dependent decision‐making task and (2) how trait self‐control would moderate such an effect. In two experiments, participants performed a dynamic decision‐making task where they chose one of two options on each trial. The increasing option always gave a smaller immediate reward but caused future rewards for both options to increase. The decreasing option always gave a larger immediate reward but caused future rewards for both options to decrease. In Experiment 1 where the two options had equivalent expected value in the long run, participants were more prone to select the increasing option, which yielded larger benefits on future trials, in the loss‐minimization condition than in the gain‐maximization condition. Trait self‐control moderated the effect of losses by enhancing the effect for low self‐control participants while attenuating it for high self‐control participants. In Experiment 2 where selecting the increasing option was suboptimal, low self‐control participants still attempted to reduce losses on future trials by selecting the increasing option more often than high self‐control participants. These results suggest that decision makers value delayed consequences of their actions more in a losses domain relative to a gains domain and low self‐control individuals are more susceptible to such an effect. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How Does Explicit Versus Implicit Risk Information Influence Adolescent Risk‐Taking Engagement?

Adolescents have been shown to be more likely to engage in risky behaviors in daily life. Many studies have indicated that adolescents could make advantageous choices when they receive explicit information but could fail to choose advantageously when they are not informed about risks. The current study aimed to examine the influence of explicit risk information (i.e., when risk information is directly available) versus implicit risk information (i.e., when risk information has to be learned from feedback) on risk‐taking engagement, in order to clarify whether the enhanced risk‐taking observed in decision making under ambiguity in adolescents results from either a greater exploration of ambiguous situations (i.e., a higher ambiguity tolerance) or a specific difficulty associated with learning based on previous choices' outcomes. Adolescents and young adults completed a new adaptation of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task. They were required to accumulate as many points as possible by inflating balloons associated with variable break points and avoiding explosions. This adaptation involved a manipulation of the information level with two conditions, an “informed” condition and a “noninformed” condition, in which the participants had to learn the matching of colors with balloons' resistances based on feedback. The results demonstrated that providing explicit risk information allows adolescents to be as efficient as adults at the end of the game. In contrast, adolescents failed to adjust risk‐taking to the balloon resistance in the noninformed condition. These findings critically suggest that this failure reflects a specific impairment of feedback‐based learning ability but not a global excess of risk‐taking during adolescence. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

No evidence of risk-taking or impulsive behaviour in a person with episodic amnesia: Implications for the role of the hippocampus in future-regarding decision-making

Does advantageous decision-making require one to explicitly remember the outcome of a series of past decisions or to imagine future personal consequences of one's choices? Findings that amnesic people with hippocampal damage cannot form a clear preference for advantageous decks over many learning trials on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) have been taken to suggest that complex decision-making on the IGT depends on declarative (episodic) memory and hippocampal integrity. Alternatively, impaired IGT performance in amnesic individuals could be secondary to risk-taking and/or impulsive behaviour resulting from impaired episodic future thinking (i.e. prospection) known to accompany amnesia. We tested this possibility in the amnesic individual K.C. using the IGT and the Toronto Gambling Task (TGT), a novel task that dissociates impulsivity from risk-taking without placing demands on declarative memory. K.C. did not develop a preference for advantageous over disadvantageous decks on the IGT and, instead, showed a slight preference for short-term gains and an inability to acquire a more adaptive appreciation of longer-term losses. He also did not display impulsive or risk-taking behaviour on the TGT, despite a profound inability to imagine personal future experiences. These findings suggest that impaired decision-making on the IGT in amnesia is unlikely to reflect a predilection to act in the moment or failure to take future consequences into account. Instead, some forms of future-regarding decision-making may be dissociable, with performance on tasks relying on declarative learning or on episodic-constructive processes more likely to be impaired.     

A mixed-effects expectancy-valence model for the Iowa gambling task

The Iowa gambling task (IGT; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994) was developed to simulate real-life decision making under uncertainty. The task has been widely used to examine possible neurocognitive deficits in normal and clinical populations. Busemeyer and Stout (2002) proposed the expectancy-valence (EV) model to explicitly account for individual participants’ repeated choices in the IGT. Parameters of the EV model presumably measure different psychological processes that underlie performance on the task, and their values may be used to differentiate individuals across different populations. In the present article, the EV model is extended to include both fixed effects and subject-specific random effects. The mixed-effects EV model fits the nested structure of observations in the IGT naturally and provides a unified procedure for parameter estimation and comparisons among groups of populations. We illustrate the utility of the mixed-effects approach with an analysis of gender differences using a real data set. A simulation study was conducted to verify the advantages of this approach.     

The effect of age on decision making according to the Iowa gambling task

Aging has been associated with several brain changes that often affect the cognitive functioning of adults, but changes in executive functions, particularly in the field of decision making, have not been fully investigated. The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a widely used tool to evaluate decision making, but little is known about the effect of age on its results. This study used the IGT and compared healthy young (n = 40) and elderly (n = 40) adults to evaluate their decision making processes. There were significant differences in the learning curve of the two age groups, but no difference in overall IGT performance. The results for the first IGT block were different from those of the rest of the task, and the group of elderly adults had a better performance in this block. Elderly adults also showed a preference for deck A, the one that resulted in greater losses. Findings confirmed the results of other studies, which reported that the IGT block score is the variable with the greatest sensitivity to age in this instrument.     

Working memory involved in predicting future outcomes based on past experiences

Deficits in working memory have been shown to contribute to poor performance on the Iowa Gambling Task [IGT: Bechara, A., &; Martin, E.M. (2004). Impaired decision making related to working memory deficits in individuals with substance addictions. Neuropsychology, 18, 152–162]. Similarly, a secondary memory load task has been shown to impair task performance [Hinson, J., Jameson, T. &; Whitney, P. (2002). Somatic markers, working memory, and decision making. Cognitive, Affective, &; Behavioural Neuroscience, 2, 341–353]. In the present study, we investigate whether the latter findings were due to increased random responding [Franco-Watkins, A. M., Pashler, H., &; Rickard, T. C. (2006). Does working memory load lead to greater impulsivity? Commentary on Hinson, Jameson, and Whitney’s (2003). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory &; Cognition, 32, 443–447]. Participants were tested under Low Working Memory (LWM; n = 18) or High Working Memory (HWM; n = 17) conditions while performing the Reversed IGT in which punishment was immediate and reward delayed [Bechara, A., Dolan, S., &; Hindes, A. (2002). Decision making and addiction (part II): Myopia for the future or hypersensitivity to reward? Neuropsychologia, 40, 1690–1705]. In support of a role for working memory in emotional decision making, compared to the LWM condition, participants in the HWM condition made significantly greater number of disadvantageous selections than that predicted by chance. Performance by the HWM group could not be fully explained by random responding.     

Keeping one's options open: The detrimental consequences of decision reversibility

People generally prefer to have the opportunity to revise their decisions. Surprisingly however, research has shown that keeping one's options open yields lower satisfaction with the decision outcome (Gilbert & Ebert, 2002). Two studies aimed to gain more insight into the detrimental consequences of decision reversibility and the cognitive processes underlying decision reversibility. Building upon literature on goal fulfillment we hypothesized and found in a first experiment that as long as decisions are still open to change, accessibility of decision-related constructs is increased compared to neutral constructs. A second experiment demonstrated that decision reversibility undermines working memory capacity. Moreover participants experienced higher regret after having made a reversible decision, an effect that was mediated by decreased working memory capacity. The study set implies that reversible decisions yield lower working memory capacity because people continue to think about the, still relevant, choice options. In the end this might increase dissatisfaction with the decision and regret.