Citation

Starcke K, Pawlikowski M, Wolf OT, Altstötter-Gleich C, Brand M. Cogn. Process. 2011; 12(2): 177-182.

Affiliation

Department of General Psychology: Cognition, University of Duisburg-Essen, Forsthausweg 2, 47057, Duisburg, Germany, katrin.starcke@uni-due.de.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Springer Verlag)

DOI

10.1007/s10339-010-0387-3

PMID

21210182

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.

Language: en