Decision-making after Traumatic Brain Injury in Children: A Preliminary Study

Decision-making under conditions of uncertainty was studied in 11 children with moderate to severe post-acute traumatic brain injury (TBI) using a modification of the Iowa Gambling Task ( Bechara et al., 1994 ). We hypothesized that decision-making would be compromised in children with TBI. The results revealed that when divided into subgroups by lesion location, children with lesions in the amygdala (AM) were impaired on modified gambling task performance, but children with ventromedial (VM) lesions did not appear to be impaired on the task. These results are in contrast to studies of decision-making in adults with focal lesions of vascular etiology.