Iowa Gambling Task Description
How is the Task Structured?
The Iowa Gambling Task is an incredibly simple test. The participant is presented with four virtual decks of cards if playing on a computer, or four real decks if doing the test in the physical domain. The participant is informed that the outcome of each choice, that being which deck they choose to draw a card from, will reward or penalize them. The aim of the game is to raise as much money as possible through maximizing the rewards and minimizing the number of penalties incurred. After several plays on each deck the participant should understand and form an intuition of how to proceed in the game. The key here is that you must use this specific set up for the test. However, you can notice the patterns of behavior while playing online blackjack or playing roulette.
Common Findings Upon Completion of the Task
The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a decision-making task that preferentially involves the right prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, the performance of the task is driven by two attributes. Experiment Description. Participants are presented with four shapes on a computer screen. Each shape will either reward or penalize, using points. The goal of the game is to accumulate as many points as possible. The shapes differ from each other in the balance of reward versus penalty. Some shapes tend to reward the player more often than others. Iowa Gambling Task. A simulation of real life decision-making, the Iowa gambling task is widely used in cognition and emotion research. Participants are presented with four virtual decks of cards on a computer screen. They are told that each time they choose a card they stand to win some game money. The Iowa gambling task (IGT) is a psychological task thought to simulate real-life decision making. It was introduced by Antoine Bechara, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio and Steven Anderson, then researchers at the University of Iowa. In this video I describe how the Iowa Gambling Task is administered in psychological tests. #iowagamblingtask #psychology.
The majority of participants sample a few cards from each deck to gain an understanding of the game mechanics. Once an intuition has been developed, usually at about 20-30 selections into the game, the player is generally very good at selecting the cards from the decks that will most efficiently build their reward/bank balance in the game. However, the test is designed to identify patients with an orbitofrontal cortex dysfunction (OFCD). In the case a patient playing the Iowa Gambling Test has an OFCD, the likeliness is they will fail to recognize the decks that reward them the most efficient and will continue to persevere with bad decks. Furthermore, researchers are able to monitor the reaction time of each choice on the player. Healthy patients are witnessed as displaying a stress reaction to hovering over bad decks, even after just 10 selections into the game. By contrast, players with neurological dysfunctions continue to choose outcomes that yield high immediate rewards in spite of higher losses in the future.
Bechara and Damasio explain these findings in great detail. The key conclusion relates to the somatic marker hypothesis, which ascertains that key decision making is often made in the heat of emotions and it is emotions that ultimately guide behavior and decision making. This obviously has particular relevance to gambling psychology which we will attempt to bring into the equation in the following section. If you want a quick break from the dense psychological analysis, have a read of this relatable article on how gamblers try to get good luck.
Can the Iowa Gambling Task Identify Gambling Addiction?
It seems like a very logical conclusion to make given the results of healthy and dysfunctional patients. The apparent inability to recognize risk whilst making a decision, and being blinded by the potential to yield larger immediate gains is a familiar problem to anyone who understands gambling addiction. Participants who are constantly choosing a deck that will yield higher gains but comes with a much higher chance of a high penalty are more likely to become gambling addicts. Players who recognize that small incremental gains at a low-risk desk are better for them in the long-run are less likely to be gambling addicts. This simple hypothesis has become the foundation of this test and remains a large reason why it is attributed to pushing advancements in the assistance of gambling addiction.
What Other Lessons Can We Learn from the Iowa Gambling Test
Whilst the conclusions drawn from the Iowa Gambling test is indeed very fascinating, they are by no means the limit of this psychological phenomenon. The test itself can be used to extrapolate many conclusions about the process of human decision making. Below we have selected some of the most interesting conclusions found by studies of the Iowa Gambling Test. In particular, there is a fundamental need to explain the connection between emotion and decision-making.
Iowa Gambling Task Professional Manual
- Gain and loss frequency are in fact the most crucial features of a gambling game when determining which one to choose. Subjects in the Iowa Gambling Test who are of a healthy pre-disposition were increasingly more likely to choose the deck that gave the most wins, despite the size of the reward.
- Having the ability to memorize stuff and rules lead to favorable decision making. Subjects who are able to work something out, and at the same time remember crucial details about a task were far more likely to succeed in the Iowa Gambling Task.
- Participants who take fewer drugs either medication or recreational performed far better under the pressure of the Iowa Gambling Task. It is well-known that recreational drug use has an adverse effect on the psychology of the individual. With this in mind, it explains a lot of the detrimental connections between drugs and gambling addiction.
- Anxiety and other mental conditions of a similar nature tend to cause a negative impact on our ability to make good decisions. With the pressure of reward and risk, participants with high-anxiety are often likely to avoid risk all together at all costs. This can lead to a high opportunity cost from missing out on potential gains.
A Few Final Words
The Iowa Gambling Task is by all measures a fascinating concept and study of the human decision-making process. The results gained from such a study can indeed be utilized and deployed to better understand gambling addiction and greater mysteries around the human psyche. For more wonderful reports on psychology in gambling, check out our article on the Gamblers Fallacy. If you think that you may be developing or already have unhealthy attitudes while gambling, read our guide to responsible gambling.
You can find out more about the Iowa Gambling Task here.
In my last post, I wrote that people who’re primed to think about free will tend to make riskier decisions. This is true, but like many things in psychology, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds at first.
The problem is that “risky decisions” aren’t a tangible thing that’s easy to quantify. When I say that people with free will are more likely to make risky decisions, what I mean is that they’re more likely to behave a certain way on a laboratory task.
In this case, the task is something called the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). The IGT is a simple game where you win or lose money, and different people play the game with different strategies.
I’m going to talk briefly about how the game works, what it tells us about how people make decisions and evaluate risk, and how the strategy you use might say something about how you make decisions.
However, before I do this, you might want to try playing the game yourself. There’s an iOS app and an Android app available. If you want to try it firsthand, you should stop reading now and do it – I’m about to give away the secret to how the game works, after which point you won’t be able to play anymore.
OK, don’t say I didn’t warn you!
The IGT consists of four stacks of cards, and you play by turning over cards from any of the stacks. At any point, you choose which stack you want to pick a card from.
Some of the cards give you rewards, and you gain money. Other cards penalize you, and you lose money. The goal, of course, is to end up with as much money as possible.
When you flip over a given card, it’s up to chance whether that card’s going to reward you or penalize you. But there’s one thing you do know that makes the game work: the four decks are stacked differently, so some decks are better overall than others.
That’s all you know when you start. What you don’t know is the specific rules of how the decks are stacked (spoiler alert!):
- The cards in decks A and B have larger rewards than the cards in decks C and D
- The penalty cards in deck A are more frequent than the penalty cards in deck B, but the penalties in deck B are larger than in deck A. Likewise, the penalty cards in deck C are more frequent than the penalty cards in deck B, but the penalties in deck D are larger than in deck c.
- Altogether, the penalties in decks A and B outweigh the rewards, but the rewards in decks C and D outweigh the penalties. In other words, choosing cards from the decks with the higher rewards loses money over time, and choosing cards from the decks with the lower rewards gains it.
Therefore, the basic idea is that there’s a conflict between short-term and long-term rewards. If you keep picking the cards with the higher short-term rewards, you’ll lose money in the long term.
When researchers started having test subjects play the IGT, they found that people with damage to the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in decision making, don’t adapt to choose from the “good” decks that win money over time. They keep going for the decks that lose money but have larger immediate rewards.
The initial assumption was that most healthy people explore all the decks in the early stages of the game and grow to prefer decks C and D, learning to avoid the “bad” decks.
But it turns out that there’s actually quite a bit of variety in the approaches people take. Some people opt for the larger immediate rewards even if it means playing a suboptimal long-term strategy. Many people also develop a preference for the decks that have the most frequent rewards – these people choose more cards from deck B, which has very infrequent but very large penalties.
Overall, strategies that emphasize immediate rewards but tend to lose money over time are riskier. These strategies are linked with risk-taking and impulsivity although the exact nature of the connection isn’t clear.
So when I said in my last post that people who’re thinking about free will make riskier decisions, what I meant was that they play riskier strategies on the Iowa Gambling Task – that is, strategies that give larger short-term rewards but lose money in the long run.
And these risky strategies correlate with a variety of risky real-world behaviors, including everything from reckless driving to getting tattoos. Stop and think for a minute about how what strategy you use on a simple game of chance predicts these other things about you.
More generally, the research that’s been done using the Iowa Gambling Task gives us some insight into how people make decisions. For example, it tells us:
- Sleep can improve decision making: Players who sleep between games choose deck B (the one with high, frequent rewards but occasional devastating losses) less often.
- Hunger can improve decision making: People who are hungry actually perform better on the IGT. Apparently being hungry doesn’t increase your appetite for risk.
- Too much and too little anxiety both lead to bad decisions: People with a moderate amount of anxiety are the only ones who win money on the IGT as a group. People with low levels of anxiety preferred deck B because they were overly focused on rewards while people with high levels of anxiety preferred deck A for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.
- Working memory helps decision making: People with high working memory (the kind of memory you use to hold things in your mind and, well, work with them) do better on the IGT than people with low working memory. One possibility is that making good decisions means being able to hold all the relevant factors in your mind and take them into consideration.
So this is one of the things that’s cool about psychology: something as simple as how someone plays this basic card game ties into all these other factors.
But that’s one of the things that makes psychological studies so open to interpretation too. Going back to the study of free will, you could say that people who are thinking about free will make “riskier decisions.” But you could also say they have worse decision making abilities. Or they’re less sensitive to punishment. Or they’re just worse at math. Some of these things are related, but they’re different ways of framing the same data.
In fact, there’s still a lot of disagreement over how to interpret the way people play the IGT. After the IGT was introduced, it took a while before researchers realized just how often “normal” people prefer decks with frequent rewards that still lose over time (especially deck B, which turns out to be way more popular than it has any right to be!).
Therefore, the IGT is probably a good example of how you should look at results from any psychology study: half with wonder at what well-designed experiments can reveal and half with skepticism over how the results are being interpreted.
Cambridge Gambling Task
Dice image: FreeImages.com/J. Henning Buchholz
IGT image: Wikipedia/PaulWicks