There are robust deficits on measures of risky decision-making, including the IGT (Cavedini et al., 2002; Petry, 2001), the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (Lejuez et al., 2003), the Cambridge Gamble Task (Lawrence et al., 2009a), and the Game of Dice task (Brand, 2004). In the Cambridge Gamble Task, participants are presented with an array of 10 red and blue boxes (e.g., 8 red, 2 blue), and must guess whether a token has been hidden under a red or blue box. Following this probability decision, they wager points on its outcome. Lawrence and colleagues (2009a) found that both a sample of problem gamblers and a sample of alcohol dependents made the same probability decisions as control participants (although the alcohol-dependent participants showed longer deliberation times) (Lawrence et al., 2009a). However, both clinical groups placed elevated wagers compared to controls; an effect previously observed in individuals with ventromedial prefrontal lesions (Clark et al., 2008).
