Abstract
The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between trait impulsivity, risk-taking, and decision-making performance. We recruited 20 healthy participants who performed the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART) to measure decision-making and risk-taking. The impulsivity was measured by the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale. Resting-state neural activity was recorded to explore whether brain oscillatory rhythms provide important information about the dispositional trait of impulsivity. We found a significant correlation between the ability to develop a successful strategy and the propensity to take more risks in the first trials of the BART. Risk-taking was negatively correlated with cognitive impulsivity in participants who were unable to develop a successful strategy. Neither risk-taking nor decision-making was correlated with cortical asymmetry. In a more exploratory approach, the group was sub-divided in function of participants’ performances at the IGT. We found that the group who developed a successful strategy at the IGT was more prone to risk, whereas the group who failed showed a greater cognitive impulsivity. These results emphasize the need for individuals to explore their environment to develop a successful strategy in uncertain situations, which may not be possible without taking risks.
Highlights
Decision-making is a complex cognitive process that is used, in part, to solve open and risky problems in daily life, the outcomes of which are often unpredictable [1,2]
We examined whether the ability to develop a correct strategy on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) requires specific levels of trait impulsivity and risk-taking on the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART)
To explore further the observations made on the whole group of participants, we investigated whether risk-taking at the BART was more pronounced in participants able to develop a successful whether risk-taking at the BART was more pronounced in participants able to develop a successful strategy
Summary
Decision-making is a complex cognitive process that is used, in part, to solve open and risky problems in daily life, the outcomes of which are often unpredictable [1,2]. Impairments in decision-making can have harmful direct consequences on the social and personal aspects of one’s daily life. Such impairment has been observed in many neuropsychiatric disorders [3,4,5], such as behavioral addictions [6] and substance addictions [7,8,9]. Brain Sci. 2019, 9, 248; doi:10.3390/brainsci9100248 www.mdpi.com/journal/brainsci. The IGT is principally used to describe neurophysiological and clinical differences between pathological and healthy populations [7,8,9,10,11], within-group differences are frequent and expected on this task. Several studies have reported a failure rate of up to 55% on the IGT in healthy populations for both the original and adapted versions [7,12,13,14,15]
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