The Bechara simulated gambling task is a popular method of examining decision-making deficits exhibited by brain damaged, psychopathic, antisocial personality, and drug abusing populations. However, performance on this task is confounded by complex interdependencies between cognitive, motivational, and response processes, making it difficult to sort out and identify the specific processes responsible for the observed behavioral deficits. Cognitive models provide a theoretical basis for decomposing complex tasks into separate processes, thus providing a theoretically based means for assessment of the hidden components. This article compares three competing cognitive decision models of the Bechara task in terms of their ability to explain the performance deficits observed in Huntington patients as compared to Healthy and Parkinson Disease groups. The parameters of the best fitting model are used to decompose the observed performance deficit of the Huntington patients into cognitive, motivational, and response sources.
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