Risk Reward Task
Risk Reward Task - Related Videos
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Consequences play a major role in controlling our behavior. If the consequence is a reward, then it encourages the associated behavior. Rewards can come in many forms such as a pleasant feeling, money, or food. However, sometimes an individual engages in compulsive behavior despite of negative consequences, and this state is known as addiction. Administration of addictive substances is neurochemically rewarding, which ultimately causes a loss of control in limiting the intake. Scientists aim...
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Source: Laboratories of Jonas T. Kaplan and Sarah I. Gimbel—University of Southern California Decision-making is an important component of human executive function, in which a choice about a course of action or cognition is made from many possibilities. Damage to the inferior parts of the frontal lobes can affect a person's ability to make good decisions. However, while decision-making deficits can have a large impact on one's life, these deficits can be difficult to quantify in the laboratory.
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Marginal Dishonesty: The Adding-to-10 Task
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Source: Julian Wills & Jay Van Bavel—New York University Classical economic theory asserts that people are rational and self-interested. In addition to seeking wealth and status, people are motivated by other goals. As a result, financial motives can sometimes be dwarfed by other internal needs, such as maintaining a positive self-concept or affiliating with other group members. Ethical dilemmas, such as the temptation to cheat on taxes, can result when these motives are in conflict. On...
FAQs
Researchers vary one or more choice attributes, such as reward magnitude, probability, delay, or risk, and examine how selections change across options. This design separates preferences for larger benefits from responses to uncertainty or waiting. Comparing choices across conditions helps quantify which features most strongly influence behavior, rather than treating risk preference as a single, fixed characteristic.
Choice patterns provide behavioral evidence about valuation and cognitive control. Valuation concerns how potential benefits and possible losses are weighed, whereas cognitive control supports decision-making as conditions change. By measuring selections under different task demands, researchers can investigate behavioral aspects of the brain systems associated with these functions in medical research without reducing decision-making to reward preference alone.
Outcome feedback allows investigators to compare decisions with what participants actually receive after each selection. When conditions change, repeated choices and feedback can show whether decision behavior shifts with altered reward magnitude, probability, delay, or risk. This makes feedback important for studying adaptation over time and for distinguishing general choice tendencies from responses to the current decision environment.
A typical protocol presents participants with alternatives that differ in one or more decision features, asks them to select an option, and then provides outcome feedback. Researchers record choices across task conditions and compare selection patterns. The resulting behavioral measures can summarize risk preference and decision-making under uncertainty, possible losses, changing probabilities, rewards, or delays.
These tasks are useful when a study needs a behavioral measure of altered decision-making. Medical researchers can apply them to addiction, mood disorders, and neurological disease, using choice patterns to characterize responses to potential benefits, uncertainty, or possible losses. They also support investigation of valuation and cognitive control systems that may be involved in differences across clinical conditions.
In intervention studies, task performance can serve as a behavioral endpoint, meaning an observable measure used to assess decision-making. Researchers can examine whether choice patterns differ across intervention conditions and whether individuals show different responses. This connects treatment evaluation with measurable behavior and may help identify individual differences in treatment response rather than relying only on a broad clinical label.