Heilman Renata M, Miu Andrei C, Benga Oana
Program of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, Babes-Bolyai University, CJ, Romania.
Child Neuropsychol. 2009 Jan;15(1):73-84. doi: 10.1080/09297040802266436. Epub 2008 Aug 11.
This study investigated developmental and sex-related differences in affective decision making, using a two-deck version of Children's Gambling Task administered to 3- and 4-year-old children. The main findings were that 4-year-old children displayed better decision-making performance than 3-year-olds. This effect was independent of developmental changes in inductive reasoning, language, and working memory. There were also sex differences in decision-making performance, which were apparent only in 3-year-old children and favored girls. Moreover, age predicted awareness of task and the correlation between the latter and decision-making performance was significant, but only in 4-year-old children. This study thus indicates that there is a remarkable developmental leap in affective decision making, whose effects are apparent around the age of 4, which according to our results, also marks the age when the correlation of declarative knowledge and decision-making performance becomes significant.
本研究使用儿童赌博任务的双牌版本，对3岁和4岁儿童进行测试，以调查情感决策中的发育差异和性别差异。主要研究结果是，4岁儿童的决策表现优于3岁儿童。这种效应与归纳推理、语言和工作记忆的发育变化无关。决策表现也存在性别差异，仅在3岁儿童中明显，且女孩更具优势。此外，年龄可预测对任务的意识，且后者与决策表现之间的相关性显著，但仅在4岁儿童中如此。因此，本研究表明，情感决策存在显著的发育飞跃，其影响在4岁左右明显，根据我们的结果，这一年龄也是陈述性知识与决策表现相关性变得显著的年龄。
