The Gambler's Mind

In an exciting new find of the day, I present here a study that investigates both behavioral and neurological differences between men and women as they tackle a well-known cognitive challenge. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that women and men perform differently, and that the subtle though significant behavioral differences are manifested in noticeable differences in their brain activation patterns. I’m as wary of the usefulness of brain imaging technology as the next cognitive science major, but no matter what we can actually conclude from the neurological results, I like this study for trying.


The Iowa Gambling Task is a paradigm that tests our ability to pick up on expected probabilities. Essentially, the game consists of choosing between different decks, some of which yield big losses and big gains and some of which yield smaller losses and gains. In the classic design, the low risk decks typically yield a higher expected value. To do well in this game, a subject must eventually begin to choose the decks that have the higher expected value (the lower risk decks). Typically, it takes normal subjects about 40 or 50 trials before they begin to catch on.

I first thought to look into gender differences with regard to the Iowa Gambling task when writing about the relationship between emotional responses and our judgments of value and probability. Is there useful information within our emotions, or are those emotions only distractions from or distorters of more useful cognitive information? Should we judge the future value of a good in part based on visceral emotional intuitions to it? In the age of reason, with the fading Romantic conception of the noble emotion, we more often seek to override emotions in the name of data-driven decision making. Researchers have used the Iowa Gambling Task to suggest that in certain contexts, our emotional processors provide relevant information that our cognitive centers overlook.

The Iowa Gambling Task is significant in the context of emotions and information in that it is often the case that subjects will start to choose the favorable decks even before the higher expected value is registered consciously. Subjects start to feel emotions when they are choosing the high risk decks, and so they choose the advantageous strategy due only to their emotional response.

This finding is old news. I bring up the task here because men and women think and decide differently in this game. For all the times I’ve read about the paradigm, however, I’ve never seen mention of the incredibly noticeable differences between men and women’s performance. Men, to cut to the chase, typically do markedly better in terms of choosing the advantageous strategy.

That being said, It’s not an empirical mystery any more whether women and men (sometimes) perform differently on cognitive tasks. We also know that women and men process risk differently (see my earlier post!).

What I like about this study is its emphasis on the brain. I want to know exactly how male and female cognitive processors differ on task such as this one and brain imaging is a step, albeit a small step, given the state of our actual knowledge about the brain, toward a greater understanding of how and why men and women think (and not just feel) differently. If we can track entirely different brain activation in women and men, the differences between the cognitive functioning of the sexes becomes a biological (and thus more clearly a fundamental) truth.