Impact of online poker gambling on behavioural and neurophysiological responses to a virtual gambling task

Online poker gambling (OPG) involves various executive control processes and emotion regulation. In this context, we hypothesized that online poker players, accustomed to handling virtual cards, would show high performance on computerized decision-making tasks such as the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Using press advertisements, we recruited a non-gambler group (NG; n = 20) and an OPG group (n = 22). All participants performed the IGT while their cerebral activity was recorded by electroencephalography. Compared with the OPG group, the NG group showed significantly better progression in the IGT in the last trials. Recording of brain activity revealed the appearance of a temporal map between 150 and 175 ms specific to the gain condition in both groups. A second map was observed at 215-295 ms specifically in the NG group, and the generators were identified in the occipital regions. This activity is indicative of a high level of visual awareness; thus, it reflects additional processing of visual information, which can be assumed to be induced by the lower exposure of the NGs to online card games. We hypothesize that the absence of this activity in the OPG group might be due to their online habituation to virtual environments. Online poker playing involves various executive control and emotion regulation processes that could confer advantageous decision-making over non-gamblers. Here, we found that this was non-gamblers that showed a better progression at the Iowa Gambling Task than online poker gamblers. EEG recording showed a reduced activation of some cerebral areas in late outcome processing for online poker gamblers. Compared to non-gamblers, online poker gamblers showed a reduced activation of occipital regions, indicating a lower level of visual awareness. image