Quick as a BLINK: an ultrarapid analogue of Iowa Gambling Task decision making

Over the past decade, the decision-making task of Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson (1994) , otherwise known as the Iowa Gambling Task (or IGT), has been employed in several hundred published studies. This task has helped to elucidate the nature of normal and abnormal decision making. However, the IGT has also proven time consuming to administer and difficult to employ in some clinical settings. The present study presents a novel measure that drastically reduces the time required for task administration: the Bangor Learning Intuitive and Nonverbal Kaleidoscope Task--BLINK--which employs immediate, nonverbal, visual feedback that allows participants to incorporate win/loss information within several hundred milliseconds. The present study demonstrates that BLINK is approximately 25 times faster than the IGT and also has a lower false-positive rate. In addition, we use expectancy-valence models to fit performance on our task, and we demonstrate that BLINK appears to depend on psychological mechanisms similar to those involved in IGT performance. We discuss several important theoretical and applied implications of the BLINK task.