Decision making research continues to generate new approaches to understanding addiction, in relation to developing interconnected concepts of myopia, hypersensitivity to reward and hyposensitivity to punishment. Despite high levels of inter-subject variance in former studies, little progress has been made in describing how individuals differ in terms of their decision-making strategies and behaviours within these decision-making tasks. A study was undertaken to develop methods for analysing and describing adapting response behaviours within a decision-making task. In addition, the effect of task manipulations such as feedback, penalties and practice were examined. Substitute medication maintained adult males were recruited for this study.

Interesting behavioural traits appear to reflect the performance differences between individuals, perhaps offering an additional approach to understanding the idiosyncratic nature of response behaviour during these tasks. Some insight was also gained in how task design may relate to decision-making strategies / response behaviours.