Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do covert emotional stimuli affect decision-making? We investigated this question by exposing par-ticipants to subliminal visual stimuli during a computer-ized version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) to assesswhether different categories of images (negative, neutral,or positive emotional evaluations) would influence deci-sion-making behavior. Results did show sex-group inter-actions for IGT scores. In decision learning model simu-lations, it was found that different models were more ap-propriate to explain the task performance for differentsex-group pairs. Overall, women showed more of anability to integrate the additive negative signals from thestimuli to make more advantageous decisions than themen; consequently, this made the men more resilient tothe negative effects of the positive stimuli on task-performance. When taken with existing research, the re-sults indicate that subliminal emotional stimuli can havesubtle, potentially sex-dependent, effects on behaviorduring the decision-making process.