Gambling primates: reactions to a modified Iowa Gambling Task in humans, chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys.

ABSTRACT: Humans will, at times, act against their own economic self-interest, for example, in gambling situations. To explore the evolutionary roots of this behavior, we modified a traditional human gambling task, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), for use with chimpanzees, capuchin monkeys and humans. We expanded the traditional task to include two additional payoff structures to fully elucidate the ways in which these primate species respond to differing reward distributions versus overall quantities of rewards, a component often missing in the existing literature. We found that while all three species respond as typical humans do in the standard IGT payoff structure, species and individual differences emerge in our new payoff structures. Specifically, when variance avoidance and reward maximization c

SUBMITTER: Proctor D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4137781 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature