The Iowa gambling task is a psychological task thought to simulate real-life decision-making. It was introduced by Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Anderson (1994), then researchers at the University of Iowa. It has been brought to popular attention by Antonio Damasio, proponent of the Somatic Marker Hypothesis and author of Descartes' Error. –Antonio Damasio: Context for flash reason, used in the composition and design of mystory. Conatus In his most recent book (Self Come to Mind), the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discusses the human capacity to recognize one’s own being in features of the external world (natural and cultural things, events, works).

MYSTORY 5

5) Recognition. The kind of memory specifically supported in electracy is discussed in Konsult: Theopraxesis using the example of Marcel Proust’s involuntary memory (the event of remembrance when Marcel tasted the biscuit dipped in tea). Roland Barthes referred to the punctum or sting of recognition he experienced when viewing certain photos. This event of recognition signals the operation of intuition, the intelligence accessing deep memory formed during the visceral education of disposition in childhood. This visceral orientation is not accessed directly, but informs judgments of taste (Kant), of action in prudence (phronesis), constituting the thymotic dimension of all decision. The discovery of konsult is that mystory enables theopraxesis (integrated thought-action-imagine), mise-en-machine of visceral attraction-repulsion (passional intelligence). This logic of orientation is called flash reason, conductive inference, structured in the manner of poetic epiphany, adaptive for real-time augmented smart space. We will address this rhetoric throughout KE.

–Antonio Damasio: Context for flash reason, used in the composition and design of mystory.

Damasio extends the function of the limbic system beyond that of a ‘visceral brain’ (MacLean, 1949) in arguing that multiple sources of feedback from the periphery (visceral, somatosensory, and others) shape decision-making (see Damasio, 2004). Empirical support for the SMH is largely based on performance on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara. One way Damasio demonstrated the effects of somatic markers was through the Iowa gambling task (e.g., Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994). In this task, participants are presented with four decks of cards and instructed to choose a card from any of the decks. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explained this peculiarity through a revolutionary experiment known as the Iowa Gambling Task, designed to understand real-world decisions.

In his most recent book (Self Come to Mind), the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio discusses the human capacity to recognize one’s own being in features of the external world (natural and cultural things, events, works). The world offers us a mirror in which to track the turns of our identity. He offers an example of his own experience of this capacity.

It is an object that has helped him construct, interpret, ponder and crystallize his identity, or at least his idea of it. It came to him in the early 1970s, when he was in medical school at the University of Lisbon. The sculpture, made by a woman he had just begun dating (a fellow neuroscience student and a sculptor named Hanna Costa), is a little terra-cotta figure of a man seeming to fight his way forward in a storm. And it all but cried out to Dr. Damasio with a mysterious urgency.

“Somehow I felt that it was me, or belonged to me,” he recalled. “Even though she had done it before we met.”

Antonio Damasio Gambling Experiment Stories

The doctor was even more convinced that it was a sculpture of his favorite boyhood hero: Tintin, the boyish blond reporter and detective whose comic-book adventures, written by Georges Remi (a k a Hergé) from the 1930s to the early 1980s, delighted generations of European children. Dr. Damasio was one of them, having found endless inspiration in Tintin’s feats of derring-do and the restlessly inquisitive mind that dispatched mystery after mystery with faultlessly astute reasoning and a killer right punch.

In a review of Damasio’s book, Ned Block pointed to one significant area of disagreement, not with Damasio’s example, but with how the capacity is interpreted. It reflects not so much “self-consciousness” as “phenomenal” consciousness, related to Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh.”

But there is also a different kind, as anyone who knows what it is like to have a headache, taste chocolate or see red can attest. Self-consciousness is a sophisticated and perhaps uniquely human cognitive achievement. Phenomenal consciousness by contrast — what it is like to experience — is something we share with many animals. A person who is drunk or delirious or dreaming can be excruciatingly conscious without being wakeful, self-aware or aware of his surroundings. (Block)

For the purposes of flash reason this disagreement is beside the point. It is important rather to mark this capacity as precisely the capacity augmented in the electrate apparatus, whose skill set is flash reason managing dromosphere information sprawl. The funtion of measure in image metaphysics is this event of recognition (belonging to me).

The Iowa gambling task is a psychological task thought to simulate real-life decision making.It was introduced by Bechara, Damasio, Tranel and Anderson (1994), then researchers at the University of Iowa. It has been brought to popular attention by Antonio Damasio, proponent of the Somatic markers hypothesis and author of Descartes' Error. The task is sometimes known as Bechara's Gambling Task, and is widely used in research of cognition and emotion.

Participants are presented with 4 virtual decks of cards on a computer screen. They are told that each time they choose a card they will win some game money. Every so often, however, choosing a card causes them to lose some money. The goal of the game is to win as much money as possible. Every card drawn will earn the participant a reward. Occasionally, a card will also have a penalty. Thus, some decks are 'bad decks', and other decks are 'good decks', because some will lead to losses over the long run, and others will lead to gains. The decks differ from each other in the number of trials over which the losses are distributed.

Most healthy participants sample cards from each deck, and after about 40 or 50 selections are fairly good at sticking to the good decks. Patients with orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) dysfunction, however, continue to perseverate with the bad decks, sometimes even though they know that they are losing money overall. Concurrent measurement of galvanic skin response shows that healthy participants show a 'stress' reaction to hovering over the bad decks after only 10 trials, long before conscious sensation that the decks are bad. By contrast, patients with OFC dysfunction never develop this physiological reaction to impending punishment. Bechara and his colleagues explain this in terms of the somatic marker hypothesis. The Iowa gambling task is currently being used by a number of research groups using fMRI to investigate which brain regions are activated by the task in healthy volunteers as well as clinical groups with conditions such as schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder.

Critiques of the Iowa Gambling Task

Although the IGT has achieved prominence, it is not without its critics. Criticisms have been raised over both its design and its interpretation. Published critiques include:

* A paper by Dunn, Dalgliesh and Lawrence [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16197997&query_hl=17&itool=pubmed_docsum]

* Research by Lin, Chiu, Lee and Hsieh [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=17362508&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum] , who argue that a common result (the “prominent deck B” phenomenon) argues against some of the interpretations that the IGT has been claimed to support.

* Research by Chiu and Lin [http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/3/1/37] , the “sunken deck C” phenomenon was identified, which confirmed a serious confounding embedded in the original design of IGT, this confounding makes IGT serial studies misinterpret the effect of gain-loss frequency as final-outcome for Somatic marker hypothesis.

* A research group in Taiwan utilized an IGT-modified and relatively symmetrical gamble for gain-loss frequency and long-term outcome, namely the Soochow Gambling Task (SGT) [http://www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com/content/4/1/13] demonstrated a reverse finding of Iowa Gambling Task. Normal decision makers in SGT were mostly occupied by the immediate perspective of gain-loss and inability to hunch the long-term outcome in the standard procedure of IGT (100 trials under uncertainty). Richard Peterson [http://www.marketpsych.com/blog/2006/10/neuroeconomics-2006-book-large-cap.html] [http://www.marketpsych.com/blog/2007/10/neuroeconomics-2007-happenings-at-sfn.html] in his book, Inside the investor’s brain [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0470067373] , considered the serial findings of SGT may be congruent with the Nassim Taleb’s [http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/] suggestion on some fooled choices in investment.

References

Antonio Damasio Gambling Experiments

* Bechara A, Damasio AR, Damasio H, Anderson SW (1994). 'Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex', 'Cognition' 50: 7-15.

Antonio Damasio Gambling Experiment Definition

External links

Antonio Damasio Gambling Experiment Theory

*A free implementation of the Iowa Gambling task is available as part of the [http://pebl.sourceforge.net PEBL Project] [http://pebl.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/User-Contributed_Experiments/Iowa_Gambling_Task]
*Another, web based, implementation that will also run as a standalone application is available [http://users.fmg.uva.nl/rgrasman/jscript/2005/09/iowa-gambling-task.html here] .
*An Italian implementation is available [http://www.mondoxsardegna.it/igt.php here] .