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Decision-making under risk conditions is susceptible to interference by a secondary executive task

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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.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (BR 2894/61).

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Correspondence to Katrin Starcke.

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Starcke, K., Pawlikowski, M., Wolf, O.T. et al. Decision-making under risk conditions is susceptible to interference by a secondary executive task. Cogn Process 12, 177–182 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-010-0387-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-010-0387-3

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