Paradoxical effects of education on the Iowa Gambling Task q Cathryn E.Y. Evans, Karen Kemish, and Oliver H. Turnbull * Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, University of Wales, Bangor, Wales LL57 2AS, UK Accepted 12 February 2004 Abstract Suitable normative information on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is not currently available, though it is clear that there is great individual variability in performance on this assessment tool. Given that the task is presumed to measure the emotion-based learning systems that are thought to form the biological basis of Ôintuition,Õ there is some reason to think that education (especially tertiary education) might explicitly de-emphasise the role of emotion-based learning in decision-making. This suggests the paradoxical finding that better-educated participants should show poorer performance on the IGT. We recruited 30 participants (all female, all aged 18–25) to participate in a Ôreal moneyÕ version of the IGT. There was no significant difference in performance in blocks 1–3 of the task (trials 1–60). However, there was a substantial effect of education on the final two blocks (trials 61–100), such that the less- well-educated participants produced twice as much of an improvement over baseline as did their university-educated colleagues. A range of possible explanations for this remarkable finding are discussed. The most likely appears to be that tertiary education specifically discourages the use of emotion-based learning systems in decision-making. These findings bear on the extent to which education has a role to play in our reliance on cognition and emotion in decision-making, including the likely role of education in the generation and maintenance of false beliefs. Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a well-established measure of the role of emotion in decision-making, and demonstrates the extent to which learning based on emotion is useful in dealing with complex problem- solving situations (Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & An- derson, 1994). The Gambling Task has been of especial interest to clinical neuropsychologists, because patients with lesions to the ventromesial frontal lobes are well known to make ineffective (even catastrophic) life choi- ces after their brain injury, but often do well on other measures of executive function (see Damasio, 1996). However, such patients fail to show the normal pattern of cumulative learning on the Gambling Task—giving the clinical community the possibility of measuring a deficit that they had long been aware of, but could not quantify. The IGT appears to tap a class of psychological function (emotion-based learning) that other dysexecu- tive tasks do not properly capture. This ability (which we subjectively label Ôintuition,Õ see Damasio, 1994, p. 188) provides an aggregate measure of the emotional conse- quences of our previous interactions with objects in the world: so that we can estimate whether the likely out- come of a potential action will be positive or negative. While the Gambling Task is likely to be a measure of great importance to clinical neuropsychologists, suitable normative information is not available. Some impression of the performance of neurologically normal individuals was published in Bechara, Damasio, and Damasio (2000a) and Bechara, Tranel, and Damasio (2000b). However, these data served only to demonstrate that participants showed great individual variability. For example, Fig. 2 in Bechara et al. (2001, p. 384) shows that some 33% of neurologically normal individuals perform within the range of patients with ventromesial frontal lesions. A similar finding reported in Bechara and Damasio (2002, p. 1679) suggests a figure of 37%. The finding of great individual variability on the task is consistent with the claim that humans show substantial individual differences when using emotional q This research was funded by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). * Corresponding author. Fax: +44-1248-382-599. E-mail address: o.turnbull@bangor.ac.uk (O.H. Turnbull). 0278-2626/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2004.02.022 Brain and Cognition 54 (2004) 240–244 www.elsevier.com/locate/b&c