The Iowa Gambling Task: A Review of the Historical Evolution, Scientific Basis, and Use in Functional Neuroimaging

Abstract

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) provides a framework to evaluate an individual decision-making process through a simulated card game where the risks and rewards vary by the decks chosen. Participants are expected to understand the logic behind the allocation of gains and losses over the course of the test and adapt their pattern of choices accordingly. This review explores the scientific work on studying problem gambling via the IGT while employing neuroimaging techniques. We first concentrate on the historical evolution of the IGT as a mechanism for studying gamblers’ behavioral patterns. Our research will also discuss the prefrontal cortex as this region of the brain is most affected by changes in behavioral patterns. In this review, we describe a number of features that may be useful in investigating decision-making patterns that lead to gambling addiction. We discuss the evidence base to date including experiments involving gambling behavior in different groups of participants (e.g., males and females, adults and minors, patients and controls) and alterations to experiment conditions that provide more thorough understanding of thought patterns in potential gamblers. We conclude that psychological testing combined with functional imaging provide powerful tools to further examine the relationships between functional impairment of the brain and a person’s ability to objectively anticipate the end results of their decisions.

Marcador somático y toma de decisiones en operadores de Aeronaves Remotamente Tripuladas

“…Este hallazgo coincide con el hecho de que en el EEG los operadores más experimentados presentan el menor número de áreas cerebrales activadas en cada una de las frecuencias (alfa, beta y gama), esto implica un mayor grado de aprendizaje y consolidación de las habilidades requeridas para la operación. Estos hallazgos permiten observar una correspondencia entre los resultados de la BANFE-2, IGTv2 y las imágenes derivadas por EEGLAB de los monitoreos cerebrales, resultados que se han obtenido en estudios previos con el uso de Tomografía de emisión de positrones y resonancia magnética cerebral funcional (Aram et al, 2019).…”

“…Se eligió el IGTv2 (juego de cartas) por su amplia utilización y validez reconocida para la evaluación de la toma de decisiones (Aram et al, 2019), esta versión al ser sistematizada disminuye errores en la obtención de la información ya que el evaluador poco interviene en la ejecución de la prueba y el evaluado no es reactivo al lenguaje no verbal del examinador; adicionalmente, su sistematización permite tener los registros más precisos de tiempos de ejecución y por tanto un mejor análisis de la toma de decisiones.…”

Emotion regulation and decision-making in persons with dementia: A scoping review

“…Decision-making tasks have been widely used to understand everyday decision-making processes and impairments in various populations ( Aram et al, 2019 ; Jacus et al, 2018 ). Such tasks include two main types, namely, decision-making under uncertainty (in which premises, outcomes, and feedback are initially unknown) and decision-making under risk (in which the potential outcomes and outcome probability of different options are known or can be inferred using available information) ( Ryterska et al, 2013 ) (various decision-making tasks draw on the above principles; see Supplementary Appendix 1 for descriptions of selected tasks).…”

Using Methods From Computational Decision-making to Predict Nonadherence to Fitness Goals: Protocol for an Observational Study

“…Several studies have shown that participants select the less favorable decks with larger penalties and that there may be a drive to choose more frequent gains and immediacy of reward rather than long-term outcomes. This is referred to as gain-loss frequency [ 39 , 40 ] and healthy participants are influenced by the frequency of losses rather than the long-term outcomes [ 41 ]. In 2013, Steingroever et al [ 41 ] suggested that performance inconsistencies impacted the value of IGT to measure real-life decision-making.…”