Abstract
Decision-making under conditions of uncertainty was studied in 11 children with moderate to severe post-acute traumatic brain injury (TBI) using a modification of the Iowa Gambling Task (CitationBechara et al., 1994). We hypothesized that decision-making would be compromised in children with TBI. The results revealed that when divided into subgroups by lesion location, children with lesions in the amygdala (AM) were impaired on modified gambling task performance, but children with ventromedial (VM) lesions did not appear to be impaired on the task. These results are in contrast to studies of decision-making in adults with focal lesions of vascular etiology.
This work was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NS21889) to Dr. Levin. The authors are indebted to Stacey Martin for editorial assistance, to Allison Franz and Shelley Benton for data collection, and to Benjamin Russell for computer software programming.