Background: The Somatic Marker Hypothesis suggests that normal subjects are "foreseeable" and ventromedial prefrontal patients are "myopic" in making decisions, as the behavior shown in the Iowa Gambling Task. The present study questions previous findings because of the existing confounding between long-term outcome (expected value, EV) and gain-loss frequency variables in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). A newly and symmetrically designed gamble, namely the Soochow Gambling Task (SGT), with a high-contrast EV between bad (A, B) and good (C, D) decks, is conducted to clarify the issue about IGT confounding. Based on the prediction of EV (a basic assumption of IGT), participants should prefer to choose good decks C and D rather than bad decks A and B in SGT. In contrast, according to the prediction of gain-loss frequency, subjects should prefer the decks A and B because they possessed relatively the high-frequency gain.
The cross-cultural generalizability of two Western intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the WAIS, in a non-Western culture was examined. Samples of 976 Australian and 1003 Chinese university and high school students participated in a rating task. Items from the two tests were given to students, and were rated on the two aspects of relevance and difficulty. On relevance ratings, the underlying three-factor structure of the Chinese sample accords very well with that of the Australian, suggesting a basic common structure for the concept of intelligence across cultures. The three factors were spatial-mechanical, verbal and memory. The results also showed that both cultures consider spatial-mechanical items most important and memory items least important. The two samples differed, however, in mean difficulty scores on the three dimensions. These differences were attributed to possible cultural differences in nurturing and providing opportunities to practice the different skills. It is concluded that the concept of intelligence is comparable between Australian and Chinese cultures, and that, for both cultures, the two tests are legitimate measures of the intelligence construct.
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