Abstract
Online sports betting is a popular recreational activity in Nigeria. Like other forms of gambling, risk of pathological progression exists for gamblers who continue betting despite severe financial and psychosocial consequences. In the present study, we examined whether this population of gamblers shows deficits in decision making and cognitive flexibility that have been documented in Western gambling populations. Thirty‐six online sports bettors and 42 non‐gambling participants completed a version of the Iowa gambling task (IGT) and an established set‐shifting task for the assessment of cognitive flexibility. The two groups did not differ significantly in the selection of disadvantageous decks on the IGT. In contrast, sports bettors committed significantly more errors on the set‐shifting task than non‐gambling control participants. As this performance deficit was not specific to trials requiring a set shift, it most likely resulted from gambling‐related changes in general cognitive or motivational abilities that are required to successfully complete challenging mental tasks. While our results illustrate that findings from Western populations cannot automatically be generalised to other contexts, it should be noted that we focused on only one particular type of gambling and included mostly participants with mild gambling‐related problems.
Highlights
Gambling is an ubiquitous activity among adolescents and young adults across the globe (Vigna-Taglianti et al, 2017)
Similar patterns have been observed in patients with prefrontal lesions (Demakis, 2003) or Parkinson’s disease (Lange, Brückner, Knebel, Seer, & Kopp, 2018), contributing to the view that cognitive flexibility relies on the integrity of the prefrontal cortex and its connections with the basal ganglia (Hazy, Frank, & O’Reilly, 2007)
Gamblers did not differ from non-gamblers in their ability to learn from the outcome of their choices over the course of the Iowa gambling task (IGT)
Summary
Gambling is an ubiquitous activity among adolescents and young adults across the globe (Vigna-Taglianti et al, 2017). One line of research on the determinants of problem gambling focuses on impairments in cognitive processes on the part of the gambler Such impairments are often examined by means of laboratory decision-making tasks and tests of cognitive flexibility. Selecting cards from the advantageous deck, on the other hand, relates to smaller wins and losses and a positive expected value Performance in this task requires that participants deal with this uncertainty in the context of the reward and punishment structure, as they gradually learn over the trials which decks offer more rewards than punishment in the long term. The only study we are aware of did not reveal differences in task-switching performance between pathological gamblers and healthy controls (van Timmeren, Jansen, Caan, Goudriaan, & van Holst, 2016)
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