[Abstract Title]. - Society for Neuroscience

load or task switching, suggesting that the deficits may lie in the „executive‟ process of both
cognitive areas. Thus, the problems related to working memory and switching in substance
dependent individuals may arise when a strategy should be efficiently implemented in order to
perform the operation. Finally, women addicted to either cocaine or methamphetamine
performed significantly worse on the IGT than men addicted to the same drug types. This novel
finding regarding sex-related differences raises the possibility that the frontal lobes and related
decision-making abilities, are affected differently in men and women addicted to cocaine and
methamphetamine. These results further elucidate the effects of different types of substance
abuse and sex on separate domains of executive functioning.
Disclosures: E.A.A. Van der Plas, None; E.A. Crone, None; W. van den Wildenberg,
None; D. Tranel, None; A. Bechara, None.
Poster
289. Human Decision Making
Time: Sunday, November 16, 2008, 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Program#/Poster#: 289.14/RR50
Topic: F.01.g. Decision making and reasoning
Support: NIH Grant EY08266
Title: The neural correlates of value and probability in decision under risk and in an equivalent
motor task
Authors: *S.-W. WU 1 , M. R. DELGADO 3 , L. T. MALONEY 2 ;
1 Psychology, 2 Psychology and Ctr. for Neural Sci., New York Univ., New York, NY;
3 Psychology, Rutgers Univ., Newark, NJ
Abstract: There is considerable evidence that human economic decision-making deviates from
the predictions of Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and considerable evidence from research on
perception and action, indicating that human performance is close to optimal. This discrepancy
might suggest that humans are better at making perceptual and motor decisions than economic
decisions. However, given the large differences in task design between classical economic and
perceptual/motor paradigms, no conclusion can be drawn. The goals of this study were to (1)
develop a novel method to translate classical economic tasks to mathematically equivalent
visuomotor tasks to allow comparison of choice behavior in the two modalities, and (2)
investigate the neural correlates of value and probability in an economic decision task and an
equivalent motor task.
The experiment consisted of 3 sessions. First, subjects (N=14) participated in a motor training