Beer Yaakov Mental Health Center, Tel Aviv University, Israel.
Psychiatry Res. 2011 Jun 30;188(1):71-7. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2011.02.021. Epub 2011 Mar 22.
This work investigates whether inhibition impairments influence the decision making process in pathological gamblers (PGs). The PG (N=51) subjects performed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT as the measure of the decision making process) and two tests of inhibition: the Stroop (interference inhibition), and the Go/NoGo (response inhibition), and were compared with demographically matched healthy subjects (N=57). Performance in the IGT block 1 and block 2 did not differ between the groups, but the differences between the PGs and healthy controls began to be significant in block 3, block 4 and block 5. PGs learned the IGT task more slowly than the healthy controls and had non-optimal outcomes (more disadvantageous choices). Impaired IGT performance in PGs was not related to an inhibition ability measured by the Stroop (interference response time) and the Go/NoGo (number of commission errors) parameters. Further controlled studies with neuroimaging techniques may help to clarify the particular brain mechanisms underlying the impaired decision making process in PGs.
本研究旨在探讨抑制障碍是否会影响病理性赌博者（PGs）的决策过程。PG（N=51）受试者进行了爱荷华赌博任务（IGT 作为决策过程的衡量标准）和两项抑制测试：Stroop（干扰抑制）和 Go/NoGo（反应抑制），并与人口统计学匹配的健康受试者（N=57）进行了比较。两组在 IGT 第 1 块和第 2 块的表现没有差异，但在第 3 块、第 4 块和第 5 块，PGs 和健康对照组之间的差异开始变得显著。PGs 学习 IGT 任务的速度比健康对照组慢，并且结果不理想（做出更多不利的选择）。PGs 的 IGT 表现受损与 Stroop（干扰反应时间）和 Go/NoGo（错误次数）参数衡量的抑制能力无关。进一步采用神经影像学技术的对照研究可能有助于阐明 PGs 决策过程受损的特定大脑机制。
