Decision-Making Under Risk and Uncertainty by Substance Abusers and Healthy Controls
Abstract
Cognitive impairment characterized by high impulsivity and risk-taking has been correlated with substance-related disorders. However, it is unclear if the decision-making process is well known upon consideration of factors such as uncertainty environments, risk, and time manipulation in different decision-making procedures. The main objective of this study was to identify behavioral differences between substance abusers and healthy control participants in a behavioral test battery, including (1) two uncertainty decision-making tasks, the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART) and the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT, trial 1–40); (2) three risk-taking tasks, the Columbia Card Task Hot version (CCT-hot), Columbia Card Task Cold version (CCT-cold), and the IGT (trial 41–100); and (3) an impulsivity task, the Delay Discounting task (DD). The second objective looked at how the six behavioral tests correlate. We worked with a sample of 54 adult participants (Substance abusers: n = 28; Healthy controls: n = 26). An anonymous survey website was created to execute all the cognitive tasks. The results showed no statistically significant differences between the groups in any of the tasks. However, the results showed an upward trend of impulsive (i.e., steeply discounting curve) and risk-taking behaviors (i.e., a low learning curve in IGT) in substance abuse participants. The factor analysis results showed four different main factors: (1) risk-taking task in the IGT (trial 40–100), (2) uncertainty…
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