Bechara’s Gambling Task is more popularly known as Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) which was studied by Antoine Bechara, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, and Steven Anderson, researchers from the University of Iowa. In this psychological task, the participants’ decision-making skills were observed as they played a virtual card game. Four decks were presented and each one had cards that could give rewards or penalties through game money. Some decks were “good” in the sense that they tend to give more rewards and some were “bad” since they held more penalizing cards. The findings showed that most participants become fairly good at consistently choosing “good decks” after 40 to 50 selections. However, the participants with orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) dysfunction still continued to select the bad decks. Also, unlike their healthy counterparts, the patients with OFC did not show stress reactions in response to losing a lot of game money caused by choosing the bad decks.

Bechara Gambling Task Rules

Bechara Gambling Task Definition

Iowa Gambling Task Professional Manual. Lutz, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. Has been cited by the following article: TITLE: Call for an Integrative and Multi-Disciplinary Approach to Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) AUTHORS: Alfred Mansour, Renee Lajiness-O’Neill. Iowa Gambling Task (IGT): A software version of IGT was prepared based on original IGT used by Bechara et al. (Bechara et al., 1994, 2000). The frequency of reward/penalty and magnitude were kept same as used in the original IGT. However, a minor change was made in the IGT used for this study.