Intuitive reasoning task (IRT)
The iowa-gambling-task’s purpose-built successor, introduced in Dunn et al. (2010). Its interest to this wiki is less what it measures than who built it and why: barnaby-dunn co-authored the field’s most thorough catalogue of the IGT’s design flaws (dunn-2006-somatic-marker-evaluation) and then constructed a task that fixes them, item by item.
The repairs, mapped to the objections
| IGT problem (Dunn et al. 2006) | IRT fix |
|---|---|
| bad decks pay more early, so learning requires reversal — and removing the reversal abolishes the VMPFC deficit (Fellows & Farah 2005a) | reinforcement schedule rebuilt so acquisition never requires un-learning |
| magnitude confounded with profitability, so anticipatory SCR may index variance not value (Tomb et al. 2002) | magnitude × profitability crossed in a 2 × 2 |
| deck position not counterbalanced, so choices may be location bias | position and card backs systematically counterbalanced |
| 80-card deck limit penalizes early learners in the final block | participants may select from any deck as often as they wish |
| the ‘anticipatory’ window may be post-decisional (Amiez et al. 2003) | deck choice and colour guess separated, isolating pre-decision from pre-feedback physiology |
| the schedule is cognitively penetrable (Maia & McClelland 2004) | insight probed with Maia & McClelland’s own focused questions in a validation study |
Read as a list, it is the most direct case in this wiki of criticism converted into instrumentation. Whether it worked is a separate question, and the answer is partly: the reversal, position, magnitude and window problems are genuinely addressed; penetrability is mitigated rather than solved, since hunch insight still appears above chance in block 1.
Why “intuitive,” and what the task actually indexes
Dunn et al. define intuitive ability as the degree to which a participant acquires the optimal strategy without being able to say why — operationalized simply as profitable minus unprofitable selections across all 100 trials. The framing borrows Kahneman (2003): intuition as automatic emotional judgement about whether an option is good, deployed where deliberation is unavailable.
The scoring is where a caveat belongs. “Intuitive ability” is a net choice score, exactly as in the IGT, and it carries the same interpretive burden: the label attributes the behaviour to intuition, but the measure only records the behaviour. What licenses the attribution is the insight validation — and that validation was run in a different sample, and found insight late rather than absent.
What it found
See dunn-2010-listening-to-your-heart for the full result. In brief: anticipatory bodily responses differentiated profitable from unprofitable decks and correlated with performance (r = .41) — the somatic-marker-hypothesis supported in a task purged of two of its critics’ central confounds. Interoceptive accuracy, meanwhile, was unrelated to performance (r = .08) and mattered only in interaction: better perceivers did better when their bodies were right and worse when their bodies were wrong.
Individual variation was wide — M = 25.74, SD = 40.71, with 27% of a healthy sample preferring the unprofitable decks. That figure is worth holding beside the iowa-gambling-task page’s note that 20–37% of IGT controls perform disadvantageously. Rebuilding the task did not shrink the fraction of healthy adults who fail it, which is either a fact about decision-making or a fact about four-deck card games, and no source in this wiki distinguishes them.