Somatic markers, working memory, and decision making

Abstract

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.

Selective attention to emotional stimuli: What IQ and openness do, and emotional intelligence does not

“…We demonstrate a similar finding involving emotional, rather than nonemotional stimuli, thus further extending the generalizability of IQ. Furthermore, our results complement findings 22 from other types of tasks showing that intelligence (and working memory) are very important for performance involving pre-anticipatory emotional activation (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Anderson, 1998;Hinson, Jameson, Whitney, 2002) and that EI measured as a trait fails to predict performance in this domain (Demaree, Burns, & DeDonno, 2010).…”

Components of working memory and somatic markers in decision making

“…Thus, by interfering with WM function, we prevented the development of the affective reactions that appear to guide good GT decision making. The data obtained by Hinson et al (2002) demonstrated that performance on the GT and formation of a somatic marker are dependent on WM. However, WM is a multicomponent system (e.g., Baddeley, Chincotta, & Adlam, 2001), and more data are needed to specify what aspects of WM are involved in the GT.…”

Reduced electrodermal response to errors predicts poor sustained attention performance in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

“…Two consistent findings in ADHD research have been poor sustained attention [4][5][6] and attenuated electrodermal activity (EDA) [7][8][9]. The importance of EDA as a "somatic marker" for the consequences of different behaviours [10] has been well established in decision-making tasks however it is not clear how somatic markers are related to other executive functions such as, for example, sustained attention [11]. In the present study we investigate whether the attenuated task-related EDA of children with ADHD might contribute to their poor performance on sustained attention tasks.…”