Game of Dice Task - ABCD

Background

The Game of Dice Task (GDT) is a computerized neuropsychological assessment tool used to measure decision-making under explicit risk. Developed by Brand et al. in 2005, it uses a gambling paradigm to evaluate a person's ability to choose advantageous options when the rules, probabilities, and outcomes are clearly defined.

The GDT task is used as part of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study (ABCD Study®), a decade long longitudinal study on brain development and child health supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to track the development of risk-taking behaviors in adolescents. The ABCD GDT task is run on tablets (in-person testing) and on smartphones (remote testing). It runs the basic GDT task with an added practice round to familiarize younger participants to the task procedure.

Task Procedure

The participant's main task is to win as much money as possible throughout a series of dice gambles. In each trial, the participant initiates a dice gamble (presented by a dice-rolling movie) by placing a bet on the outcome. The bets that can be placed differ in how specific a participant wants the prediction to be. For example, the participant can bet that the dice is part of a combination of 4 dice faces; or the participant can bet on one specific dice face instead. The more specific the bet, the lower the win probability and therefore the higher the possible wins and losses. The participant always has access to the possible win/loss amounts for each specific bet as well as to a visual summary of wins and losses over time.. Once the participant clicks on a specific bet, the dice-rolling movie starts.

What it Measures

The Game of Dice Task is a general assessment tool of decision-making under explicit risk

Psychological domains

• Decision-making: Response to potential rewards and losses over time
• Risk-taking: Preference for high-reward/high risk or low-reward/low-risk

Main Performance Metrics

• Net Score: Difference between the number of safe bets (bets on combinations of 3-4 faces) and risky bets (bets on combinations of 1-2 faces)

Psychiatric Conditions

Game of Dice performance tends to be impaired or enhanced in patients with the following psychiatric conditions.

• Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
• Parkinson’s Disease
• Huntington’s Disease
• Depression
• Schizophrenia
• Autism