The contingency-shifting variant Iowa Gambling Task: An investigation with young adults

Abstract

The contingency-shifting variant Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), in which the reward and punishment contingencies of different decks of cards are systematically altered, was investigated with a large group of healthy young adults (n = 208). Our findings demonstrate that the onset of unsignaled, contingency-shift phases initially disrupted learning but that performance subsequently improved during each shift. Subjective experience ratings were positively correlated with performance across all phases. A regression model showed that performance early in the task, in Blocks 3 and 4, significantly predicted later ability to shift to the changing contingencies. Subdividing participants into high performer and low performer groups revealed an increased number of selections of previously good-now-bad decks in the latter group. Overall, the contingency-shifting variant IGT may have potential as a novel measure of reversal learning in experimental and clinical settings.

Keywords:

• Contingency shifting
• Variant Iowa Gambling Task
• Emotion-based learning

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on a previous version of this article. This research was conducted as part of Matteo Cella's doctoral research under the supervision of Simon Dymond.

Notes

¹Consistent with convention, we continue to refer to the advantageous and disadvantageous decks as “C and D” and “A and B,” respectively, although the labels corresponding to the good and bad decks were in fact randomly determined for each participant.