CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the way decision making and fluid intelligence relate to each other in frontal lobe patients with different risky decision making profiles. BACKGROUND: In a recent study (Roca M, Parr A, Thompson R, Woolgar A, Torralva T, Antoun N, Manes F, Duncan J. Executive function and fluid intelligence after frontal lobe lesions. Brain in press), our group demonstrated a close relation between a well known decision-making task, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), and fluid intelligence (g factor) in a group of 18 patients with focal frontal lesions. DESIGN/METHODS: Patients with chronic focal frontal lesions were recruited from the Cambridge Cognitive Neuroscience Research Panel at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (n = 12) in Cambridge, UK and from the INECO Research Data Base in Buenos Aires, Argentina (n = 6). Lesion etiology was mostly tumor resection or cerebrovascular. Mean age of patients was 54.22 years (SD =13.94, range = 29 69) and mean estimated premorbid IQ was 110.89 (SD =13.82). Patients were considered to exhibit a clear preference for risky choices if their net IGT score was more than 1.5 SD away from the mean total score (14.20, SD = 25.3) of control subjects. Under this criterion, seven patients (39%) demonstrated a clear preference for risky decks (CPRD) while eleven (61%) did not show this preference. RESULTS: Significant correlations were found between IGT and g tasks for patients without a clear performance of risky selection on the IGT, but those correlations became non-significant in the CPRD group. Differences between CPRD and controls remained significant even after partialling out the effect of fluid intelligence.CONCLUSIONS/RELEVANCE: Fluid intelligence may be a substantial contributor to performance on the IGT, and at least in patients who exhibit a clear risky performance, deficits on this decision-making task can exceed deficits in fluid intelligence.

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