Cognitive Flexibility Affects The Performance Of Ambiguous Decision Making:An ERP Study

Ambiguous decision making is very common in our daily life, and measured by the Iowa Gambling Task(IGT).Plenty of researches focus on the relation between WCST and IGT, but the result is conflicting.In this study we based on WCST performance to separate participants into high group and low group, to investigate if impairment on cognitive flexibility can lead to disadvantageous decision and examine the neural correlates of the three stages of IGT.Thirty nine right-handed university students participated in this study.We adopted the modified version of the IGT to exclude irrelevant component from response selection.Decision making process was divided into three stages from an information processing perspective:(I)choice evaluation;(II)response selection;(III)feedback processing.In the choice evaluation stage, results revealed that in central and parietal region high group participants invoke a larger P3 than low group when bad deck appears, consistent with our predictions.In response selection stage the effect of Type of choice was significant only at frontal in the high group, with a larger effect for pass.In the feedback evaluation stage, we found that in the high group loss evoked a larger FRN, in the low group FRN effect is absent.These results indicate participant with high performance on cognitive flexibility can learn the rules of IGT faster and have more obvious somatic markers.