title: Decision-making under risk conditions is susceptible to interference by a secondary executive task.
abstract: Recent research suggests two ways of making decisions: an intuitive and an analytical one. The current study examines whether a secondary executive task interferes with advantageous decision-making in the Game of Dice Task (GDT), a decision-making task with explicit and stable rules that taps executive functioning. One group of participants performed the original GDT solely, two groups performed either the GDT and a 1-back or a 2-back working memory task as a secondary task simultaneously. Results show that the group which performed the GDT and the secondary task with high executive load (2-back) decided less advantageously than the group which did not perform a secondary executive task. These findings give further evidence for the view that decision-making under risky conditions taps into the rational-analytical system which acts in a serial and not parallel way as performance on the GDT is disturbed by a parallel task that also requires executive resources.
authors.affiliation: Department of General Psychology: Cognition, University of Duisburg-Essen, Forsthausweg 2, 47057 Duisburg, Germany. katrin.starcke@uni-due.de
authors.forename: Katrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Starcke
authors.forename: Mirko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pawlikowski
authors.forename: Oliver T
authors.initials: OT
authors.lastname: Wolf
authors.forename: Christine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Altstötter-Gleich
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brand
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D030141:Feedback, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D005715:Gambling; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012306:Risk