Impulsive decision-making: Learning to gamble wisely?

A decade ago, Bechara et al. [Bechara, A., Damasio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition, 50, 7–15] published a paper in Cognition, introducing a Gambling Task which was designed to mimic everyda...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognition 2007-10, Vol.105 (1), p.195-205
Main Authors: Glicksohn, Joseph, Naor-Ziv, Revital, Leshem, Rotem
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Antisocial Behavior
Behavior Disorders
Biological and medical sciences
Cognition
Cognition. Intelligence
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive Tests
Comparative Analysis
Conceptual Tempo
Decision Making
Decision making. Choice
Decision Support Systems
Evaluative Thinking
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Gambling
Humans
Impulsive Behavior
Impulsivity
Learning
Male
Pathology
Profiles
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Self Destructive Behavior
Substance Abuse
Surveys and Questionnaires
Task Analysis
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Summary:A decade ago, Bechara et al. [Bechara, A., Damasio, A. R., Damasio, H., & Anderson, S. W. (1994). Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition, 50, 7–15] published a paper in Cognition, introducing a Gambling Task which was designed to mimic everyday decision-making. Since then, the task has been computerized, its decision-making components have been scrutinized, and it has been employed in various patient groups, such as pathological gamblers, substance abusers, and so forth. Time and again it has been shown that while normal controls perform well on the task, it is the various target populations under scrutiny who exhibit poor performance. Yet, as we show in this paper, a total of 46% of normal individuals exhibited poor performance on the task, indicating a lack of learning. We argue that while so much importance has been placed on contrasting patients with controls, perhaps the real emphasis should lie in distinguishing among different individual profiles of performance on the task, irrespective of clinical classification. Our basic recommendation is to look at the individual data, pool when you can, and only then to contrast groups.
ISSN:0010-0277
1873-7838
DOI:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.08.003