Recollecting Cross-Cultural Evidences: Are Decision Makers Really Foresighted in Iowa Gambling Task?

Abstract

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) has become a remarkable experimental paradigm of dynamic emotion decision making. In recent years, research has emphasized the “prominent deck B (PDB) phenomenon” among normal (control group) participants, in which they favor “bad” deck B with its high-frequency gain structure—a finding that is incongruent with the original IGT hypothesis concerning foresightedness. Some studies have attributed such performance inconsistencies to cultural differences. In the present review, 86 studies featuring data on individual deck selections were drawn from an initial sample of 958 IGT-related studies published from 1994 to 2017 for further investigation. The PDB phenomenon was found in 67.44% of the studies (58 of 86), and most participants were recorded as having adopted the “gain-stay loss-randomize” strategy to cope with uncertainty. Notably, participants in our sample of studies originated from 16 areas across North America, South America, Europe, Oceania, and Asia, and the findings suggest that the PDB phenomenon may be cross-cultural.

Reanalyzing the Maia and McClelland (2004) Empirical Data: How Do Participants Really Behave in the Iowa Gambling Task?

“…We posit that, compared to explicit knowledge and implicit emotion, gainloss frequency should enable a more reasonable explanation. Moreover, it is consistent with the PDB phenomenon that several recent IGT-related studies have proposed (2,17,18,(24)(25)(26).…”

“…The PDB phenomenon that is identified is only inconsistent with the original assumption that the control group is assumed to choose more cards with high long-term outcomes (10). Consequently, this means that gain-loss frequency might be the most dominant guiding factor in decision behavior under uncertainty (2) and that the final outcome/expected value might be a secondary factor. Furthermore, an increasing number of IGT clinical studies compared the selection strategies of neurological/psychiatric patients and control groups found that the control group participants chose Deck B significantly more often than Deck A (24,(27)(28)(29)(30)(31).…”

“…Similarly, participant no. 36's preference for Deck B during the early stage of the experiment (as indicated in the oral report) also indicates the influence of gain-loss frequency (2). Moreover, Maia and McClelland (1) believed that their questionnaire did not influence the participants' IGT performance.…”

The Prominent Deck B Phenomenon in Schizophrenia: An Empirical Study on Iowa Gambling Task

“…Additionally, the above meta-analysis studies only included studies published after 2000, and one crucial clinical trial (Wilder et al, 1998) was omitted, which may affect the results of meta-analyses. Furthermore, Lee et al (2020) recollected over 900 IGT-related studies and found out 86 studies of them reported data with the four-deck format and their observation demonstrated over half of the studies (58/86, 67.44%) presented the PDB phenomenon in healthy/control groups. Namely, the PDB phenomenon and the preference of participants for disadvantageous deck B have profoundly affected the explanation of IGT performance.…”