Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) Online — Free Decision-Making & Reward Learning Test

In the card deck choice task you pick one of four decks and flip a card, 100 times in all. You start with 2,000 in virtual funds; every card pays a reward, and some also carry a penalty. Because you are never told which decks are favorable, the crux is whether, through experience, you notice the large losses hiding behind large rewards and gradually shift toward the decks that pay off over time. This is not a problem you solve by calculating a rule; it is experience-based decision making, learned by living through gains and losses.

The original Iowa Gambling Task was created in 1994 by Bechara, Damasio, and colleagues to reproduce the insensitivity to future consequences seen in patients with prefrontal damage, and it has since been used widely in research on impulsivity, addiction, and risk taking. Soundary's task is our own web implementation of that structure; it does not use the commercial IGT program or its norms and T-scores.

Here is how the decks are built. Decks A and B pay 100 per card but carry penalties totaling 1,250 every ten cards, a net loss of 250 per ten. A gives frequent smaller penalties such as 150, 300, 250, 350, and 200; B gives a single large penalty of 1,250. Decks C and D pay 50 per card with penalties totaling 250 every ten cards, a net gain of 250 per ten. C gives frequent small penalties such as 25, 50, and 75; D gives a single penalty of 250. The order in which penalties appear is shuffled within each block of ten. The task takes about three minutes.

The headline result is your advantageous-choice rate in the later phase: the percentage of your last 40 picks (out of 100) that came from deck C or D, showing whether you actually moved toward the favorable decks once early exploration was over. Below it are your final balance and the net gain or loss against the starting 2,000. Under 40% is labeled still exploring, 40 to 59% shifting toward learning, 60 to 79% learned the advantageous strategy, and 80% or more a clear gain-seeking strategy.

The detailed results show the share of C and D picks across all 100 trials and how many times you chose each of A, B, C, and D. If your last-40 rate is higher than the overall rate, you learned from experience; if both are similarly low, you have not yet factored in the loss signals. If the per-deck counts show a marked preference for B and D, the decks whose penalties are rare, you may be responding more to how often losses occur than to how large they are.

The gauge on the results screen showing your position relative to other users is a reference estimate based on Soundary user data, not a norm built from a large standardized sample, and the four bands above are reference boundaries chosen by Soundary. Because the penalty order is shuffled each time, an unlucky cluster of big penalties early on can delay learning, so avoid drawing conclusions about your disposition from a single run.

Because learning without knowing the deck structure is the whole point, one attempt teaches you which decks are favorable and the task loses much of its meaning as a learning measure from the second try onward, so space retakes several months apart. Your mood, stress, sleep, and alcohol that day alter your sensitivity to losses, and treating the virtual funds less carefully than real money changes the outcome. Individual differences are large even in laboratory studies, where a sizable share of healthy adults show no clear learning within 100 trials.

Treat the result as a mirror of your current choice habits rather than a verdict of right or wrong. Staying with A and B late in the task suggests a pull toward immediate gains over tallying cumulative losses when a big reward is in view; moving to C and D early suggests you incorporate loss signals quickly. Viewed alongside the delay discounting test, it sketches how you discount future value together with how you learn from losses, and read with an impulsivity self-report it can prompt reflection on everyday spending and investing habits.

This task is a self-check and makes no diagnosis regarding impulsivity, addiction, or frontal lobe function. Regardless of your result, if you find it hard to stop gambling, shopping, or investing even while aware of the losses, or if impulsive decisions keep causing difficulties in your life, we encourage you to consult a psychiatrist.