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Importance of punishment frequency in the Iowa gambling task: an fMRI study

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Abstract

It has been widely found that in the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara et al. Cognition, 50(1), 7–15 1994) normal subjects would gradually learn to prefer obtaining rewards for long-term benefits than seeking immediate rewards to maximize the overall profit. The current study aimed to gain an understanding of how punishment frequency in the IGT would be processed and its association with subjects’ reward preferences. In this study, we employed the clinical version of the IGT, in which response options are not only different in the long-term outcome, but also associated with different punishment frequencies. Event-related functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used to capture the subjects’ brain activity when performing the IGT. A total of 24 male subjects (mean age = 21.7 years, SD = 1.8 years), who were university students, participated in the experiment. It is found that subjects learned to select more from the decks that were advantageous in the long-term, but they were more sensitive to the effect of long-term outcome under the condition of high punishment frequency. The corresponding brain activation showed that the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) had significantly higher activation during the disadvantageous choices than the advantageous choices. Such activity difference between the two conditions of long-term outcome was more prominent with high punishment frequency than low punishment frequency; and this brain activity difference was significantly correlated with the behavioral performance under the condition of high punishment frequency. The results suggested that only in the context with high punishment frequency, there would be increased neural activity in ACC when subjects intended to select from the disadvantageous choices so that these choices would be inhibited and advantageous choices would be selected.

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Acknowledgments

The author Yufeng Zang is partly supported by “Qian Jiang Distinguished Professor” program.

Conflict of Interest

Shuangye Ma, Yufeng Zang, Vinci Cheung, and Chetwyn Chan declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Informed Consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, and the applicable revisions at the time of the investigation. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Shuangye Ma, Vinci Cheung & Chetwyn C. H. Chan

  2. Center for Cognition and Brain Disorders, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China

    Yufeng Zang

  3. Zhejiang Key Laboratory for Research in Assessment of Cognitive Impairments, Hangzhou, China

    Yufeng Zang

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  1. Shuangye Ma
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Correspondence to Vinci Cheung.

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Ma, S., Zang, Y., Cheung, V. et al. Importance of punishment frequency in the Iowa gambling task: an fMRI study. Brain Imaging and Behavior 9, 899–909 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-015-9353-0

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