Are people willing to gamble more for themselves than what they deem reasonable for others? We addressed this question in a simplified computer gambling task in which subjects chose from a set of 10 cards. Subjects selected one card at a time after being instructed that 9 cards were good (win a dollar per card) and one was really bad (lose all the money and end the game). Subjects could stop pl...

Some people love taking risks, while others avoid gambles at all costs. The neural mechanisms underlying individual variation in preference for risky or certain outcomes, however, remain poorly understood. Although behavioral pathologies associated with compulsive gambling, addiction and other psychiatric disorders implicate deficient serotonin signaling in pathological decision making, there i...

It is not known whether patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) differ from healthy people in decision making under risk, i.e., when the decision-making context offers explicit information about options, probabilities, and consequences already from the beginning. In this study, we adopted the Game of Dice Task-Double to investigate decision making under risk in a group of 36 patients wi...

This paper proposes a new approach to the problem of decision making under risk (and partly under uncertainty) by a simple cellular automaton which can simulates wellknown anomalies of risky choice. This field has been studied mainly by psychologists, economists, management scientists, and more recently neuroscientists so far. Various types of anomalous choice patterns which violate the predict...

Many psychiatric disorders are characterized by abnormal risky decision-making and dysregulated dopamine receptor expression. The current study was designed to determine how different dopamine receptor subtypes modulate risk-taking in young adult rats, using a "Risky Decision-making Task" that involves choices between small "safe" rewards and large "risky" rewards accompanied by adverse consequ...

During the last 25 years, prospect theory and its successor, cumulative prospect theory, replaced expected utility as the dominant descriptive theories of risky decision making. Although these models account for the original Allais paradoxes, 11 new paradoxes show where prospect theories lead to self-contradiction or systematic false predictions. The new findings are consistent with and, in sev...

BACKGROUND Neural mechanisms of decision-making and reward response in adolescent cannabis use disorder (CUD) are underexplored. METHODS Three groups of male adolescents were studied: CUD in full remission (n=15); controls with psychopathology without substance use disorder history (n=23); and healthy controls (n=18). We investigated neural processing of decision-making and reward under condi...

The Roles of Nicotinic and Muscarinic Cholinergic Receptors in Risky and Impulsive Decision Making. (December 2010) Ian Alfredo Mendez, B.A.; M.A., California State University, San Marcos Co-Chairs of Advisory Committee: Dr. Antonio Cepeda-Benito Dr. Barry Setlow Psychopathological conditions in which decision making is impaired are common and include schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactiv...

ADHD has been associated with various forms of risky real life decision making, for example risky driving, unsafe sex and substance abuse. However, results from laboratory studies on decision making deficits in ADHD have been inconsistent, probably because of between study differences. We therefore performed a meta-regression analysis in which 37 studies (n ADHD=1175; n Control=1222) were inclu...

Affective neuroscience has helped guide research and theory development in judgment and decision-making by revealing the role of emotional processes in choice behavior, especially when risk is involved. Evidence is emerging that qualitatively and quantitatively different processes may be involved in risky decision-making for gains and losses. We start by reviewing behavioral work by Kahneman an...