Fig. 1.

The financial decision-making task. At the beginning of each trial, participants were shown a message indicating the starting amount of money that they would receive (e.g., ‘You receive £50’) (duration 2 s). Subjects were instructed that they would not be able to retain the whole of this initial amount, but would next have to choose between a sure option and a gamble option (4 s). The sure option was presented in the Gain frame trials (A) as an amount of money retained from the starting amount (e.g., keep £20 of the £50) and in the Loss frame trials (B) as an amount of money lost from the starting amount (e.g., lose £30 of the £50). The gamble option was represented as a pie chart depicting the probability of winning (green) or losing (red) all of the starting money. The expected outcomes of the gamble and sure options were equivalent. Gain frame trials were intermixed pseudo-randomly with Loss frame trials. No feedback concerning trial outcomes was given during the experiment.