Monitoring supports performance in a dual-task paradigm involving a risky decision-making task and a working memory task.

Bettina Gathmann,Johannes Schiebener,Matthias Brand,Oliver T Wolf

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00142

Abstract

Performing two cognitively demanding tasks at the same time is known to decrease performance. The current study investigates the underlying executive functions of a dual-tasking situation involving the simultaneous performance of decision making under explicit risk and a working memory task. It is suggested that making a decision and performing a working memory task at the same time should particularly require monitoring—an executive control process supervising behavior and the state of processing on two tasks. To test the role of a supervisory/monitoring function in such a dual-tasking situation we investigated 122 participants with the Game of Dice Task plus 2-back task (GDT plus 2-back task). This dual task requires participants to make decisions under risk and to perform a 2-back working memory task at the same time. Furthermore, a task measuring a set of several executive functions gathered in the term concept formation (Modified Card Sorting Test, MCST) and the newly developed Balanced Switching Task (BST), measuring monitoring in particular, were used. The results demonstrate that concept formation and monitoring are involved in the simultaneous performance of decision making under risk and a working memory task. In particular, the mediation analysis revealed that BST performance partially mediates the influence of MCST performance on the GDT plus 2-back task. These findings suggest that monitoring is one important subfunction for superior performance in a dual-tasking situation including decision making under risk and a working memory task.

Highlights

In everyday life people often have to perform two cognitively demanding tasks simultaneously such as making important decisions based on explicit information and maintaining and manipulating information regarding another task
The results demonstrate that concept formation and monitoring are involved in the simultaneous performance of decision making under risk and a working memory task
Research focusing on decision making under risk has shown that the simultaneous performance of an additional cognitively demanding task interferes with the decision-making performance (Starcke et al, 2011; Verbruggen et al, 2012; Pabst et al, 2013; Gathmann et al, 2014a,b)

Summary

Introduction

In everyday life people often have to perform two cognitively demanding tasks simultaneously such as making important decisions based on explicit information and maintaining and manipulating information regarding another task. Decision making under risk is repeatedly found to be associated with several executive subfunctions when considering different decision-making tasks (Cambridge Gambling Task, Watkins et al, 2000; Probability-Associated Gambling Task, Bonatti et al, 2008; Balloon Analog Risk Task, Campbell et al, 2013; Columbia Card Task, Buelow, 2014; Game of Dice Task, Schiebener et al, 2014). This is because in decision making under risk the possible consequences of a decision and their probabilities are given descriptively or are at least computable based on the information provided. Several studies have addressed dual tasking in the field of decision making under risk (Verbruggen et al, 2012; Pabst et al, 2013; Gathmann et al, 2014a,b) and mainly support this assumption: It was demonstrated that making a decision while performing a simple motor control task leads to reduced risky gambling (Verbruggen et al, 2012), while www.frontiersin.org

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