Psychometrics of the Iowa and Berlin Gambling Tasks: Unresolved Issues With Reliability and Validity for Risk Taking

Assessment ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian Schmitz ◽  
Olga Kunina-Habenicht ◽  
Andrea Hildebrandt ◽  
Klaus Oberauer ◽  
Oliver Wilhelm

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is one of the most prominent paradigms employed for the assessment of risk taking in the laboratory, and it was shown to distinguish between various patient groups and controls. The present study was conducted to test the psychometric characteristics of the original IGT and of a new gambling task variant for assessing individual differences. Two studies were conducted with adults of the general population ( n = 220) and with adolescents ( n = 389). Participants were also tested on multiple measures of working memory capacity, fluid intelligence, personality traits associated with risk-taking behavior, and self-reported risk taking in various domains. Both gambling tasks had only moderate retest reliability within the same session. Moderate relations were obtained with cognitive ability. However, card selections in the gambling tasks were not correlated with personality or risk taking. These findings point to limitations of IGT type gambling tasks for the assessment of individual differences in risky decision making.

PLoS ONE ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. e81498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginie Bagneux ◽  
Noémylle Thomassin ◽  
Corentin Gonthier ◽  
Jean-Luc Roulin

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (S1) ◽  
pp. S205-S205
Author(s):  
V. Laprevote ◽  
A.L. Devin ◽  
B. Blanc ◽  
R. Schwan

IntroductionRegular cannabis use is associated with cognitive impairments, including impaired decision making measured by the Iowa Gambling Task. The question remains whether the impulsivity measured in regular cannabis users may participate to impaired decision making. Interestingly, the Cambridge Gambling Task (CGT) is a computerized gambling task allows to differentiate risk taking and impulsivity when making a decision.AimsThis study aims at separately exploring the impact of regular cannabis use on risk taking and impulsivity during decision making process.ObjectivesTo do so, we compared the performance of regular cannabis users and healthy controls during the CGT.MethodsForty-three regular cannabis users (> 7 units/week) with a cannabis use disorder (CUD), 8 non-CUD regular cannabis users and 30 healthy controls were recruited. Decision-making was assessed using the CGT. The following outcomes were considered: Delay aversion score, Overall proportion bet, quality of decision making, risk taking and risk adjustment.ResultsThe analysis on delay aversion score showed a group effect (F = 3.839, P = 0.026) but no effect on other CGT variables. This effect was explained by the fact that cannabis CUD users had a higher delay aversion score than healthy controls and non-CUD cannabis users.ConclusionsIn this study, CUD cannabis users had an increased impulsivity but no increase of risk taking and quality of decision-making. Future work should include the CGT with a clinical scale to evaluate impulsivity and a motor inhibition task to understand if the impairment observed relates to cognitive or motor abilities.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.


2011 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Upton ◽  
Anthony J. Bishara ◽  
Woo-Young Ahn ◽  
Julie C. Stout

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason S. Tsukahara ◽  
Randall W Engle

We found that individual differences in baseline pupil size correlated with fluid intelligence and working memory capacity. Larger pupil size was associated with higher cognitive ability. However, other researchers have not been able to replicate our 2016 finding – though they only measured working memory capacity and not fluid intelligence. In a reanalysis of Tsukahara et al. (2016) we show that reduced variability on baseline pupil size will result in a higher probability of obtaining smaller and non-significant correlations with working memory capacity. In two large-scale studies, we demonstrated that reduced variability in baseline pupil size values was due to the monitor being too bright. Additionally, fluid intelligence and working memory capacity did correlate with baseline pupil size except in the brightest lighting conditions. Overall, our findings demonstrated that the baseline pupil size – working memory capacity relationship was not as strong or robust as that with fluid intelligence. Our findings have strong methodological implications for researchers investigating individual differences in task-free or task-evoked pupil size. We conclude that fluid intelligence does correlate with baseline pupil size and that this is related to the functional organization of the resting-state brain through the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariya V. Cherkasova ◽  
Luke Clark ◽  
Jason J.S. Barton ◽  
Michael Schulzer ◽  
Mahsa Shafiee ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTReward-related stimuli can potently influence behaviour; for example, exposure to drug-paired cues can trigger drug use and relapse in people with addictions. Psychological mechanisms that generate such outcomes likely include cue-induced cravings and attentional biases. Recent animal data suggest another candidate mechanism: reward-paired cues can enhance risky decision making, yet whether this translates to humans is unknown. Here, we examined whether sensory reward-paired cues alter decision making under uncertainty and risk, as measured respectively by the Iowa Gambling Task and a two-choice lottery task. In the cued version of both tasks, gain feedback was augmented with reward-concurrent audiovisual stimuli. Healthy human volunteers (53 males, 78 females) performed each task once, one with and the other without cues (cued IGT/uncued VGT: n = 63; uncued IGT/cued VGT: n = 68), with concurrent eye-tracking. Reward-paired cues did not affect choice on the Iowa Gambling Task. On the two-choice lottery task, the cued group displayed riskier choice and reduced sensitivity to probability information. The cued condition was associated with reduced eye fixations on probability information shown on the screen and greater pupil dilation related to decision and reward anticipation. This pupil effect was unrelated to the risk-promoting effects of cues: the degree of pupil dilation for risky versus risk-averse choices did not differ as a function of cues. Taken together, our data show that sensory reward cues can promote riskier decisions and have additional and distinct effects on arousal.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT:Animal data suggest that reward-paired cues can promote maladaptive reward-seeking by biasing cost-benefit decision making. Whether this finding translates to humans is unknown. We examined the effects of salient reward-paired audio-visual cues on decision making under risk and uncertainty in human volunteers. Cues had risk-promoting effects on a risky choice task and independently increased task-related arousal as measured by pupil dilation. By demonstrating risk-promoting effects of cues in human participants, our data identify a mechanism whereby cue reactivity could translate into maladaptive behavioural outcomes in people with addictions.


2020 ◽  
pp. 175-211
Author(s):  
Cody A. Mashburn ◽  
Jason S. Tsukahara ◽  
Randall W. Engle

This chapter outlines the executive attention theory of higher-order cognition, which argues that individual differences in the ability to maintain information in working memory and disengage from irrelevant information is inextricably linked to variation in the ability to deploy domain-free attentional resources in a goal-directed fashion. It also summarizes recent addendums to the theory, particularly regarding the relationship between attention control, working memory capacity, and fluid intelligence. Specifically, the chapter argues that working memory capacity and fluid intelligence measures require different allocations of the same attentional resources, a fact which accounts for their strong correlation. At various points, it addresses theoretical alternatives to the executive attention theory of working memory capacity and empirical complications of the study of attention control, including difficulties deriving coherent attention control latent factors.


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