Brain and Creativity Institute and Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 2013;35(5):518-29. doi: 10.1080/13803395.2013.789484. Epub 2013 May 24.
In a previous study, we examined whether frontal patients with impaired decision making on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) would recover over time if retested on the IGT. However, a major limitation of repeated administration of the IGT is practice effects, where control participants show improvement with retesting. Therefore, the primary goal of this study was to design two alternative versions of the IGT to eliminate practice effects. We found that control participants did not show improvement in performance across the different versions of the task, thus reflecting success in our attempt to design alternative versions of the IGT. Compared to control participants, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) performed worse on all three versions of the IGT, even after controlling for age, sex, and education. The development of alternative versions of the IGT provides a valuable tool for clinicians and researchers to utilize the IGT as a way to track how the decision-making abilities of patients change over time. Additionally, these results are consistent with findings from the original studies using the IGT with patients with damage to the vmPFC, which showed that decision-making impairments do not recover over time.
在之前的一项研究中，我们考察了额叶患者在 Iowa 赌博任务（IGT）上的决策能力受损，他们是否会随着时间的推移而恢复，如果在 IGT 上重新测试的话。然而，重复进行 IGT 测试的一个主要局限性是练习效应，即控制参与者在重新测试时表现有所提高。因此，本研究的主要目标是设计 IGT 的两种替代版本，以消除练习效应。我们发现，控制参与者在任务的不同版本中并没有表现出性能的提高，这反映了我们在设计 IGT 的替代版本方面的成功。与控制参与者相比，腹内侧前额叶皮质（vmPFC）受损的患者在所有三个版本的 IGT 上的表现都更差，即使在控制了年龄、性别和教育程度之后也是如此。IGT 的替代版本的开发为临床医生和研究人员提供了一个有价值的工具，他们可以利用 IGT 来跟踪患者的决策能力随着时间的推移如何变化。此外，这些结果与使用 IGT 对 vmPFC 受损患者进行的原始研究的发现一致，这些研究表明，决策障碍不会随着时间的推移而恢复。
