O Papel de Variáveis Socio-Demográficas na Tomada de Decis？o: Uma Revis？o Sistemática sobre o Iowa Gambling Task

there is a growing interest in the role of socio-demographic variables in cognitive processing in recent years. some studies in neuropsychology have been showing that socio-cultural factors can be important variables in the execution of neuropsychological tasks. however, investigations with healthy samples are still new in the field. this paper aims to present a systematic review of the literature about the role of the socio-demographic variables education, age and gender in the decision making processing assessed by the iowa gambling task (igt). medline, pubmed, psycinfo and web of science databases were searched, from 2000 to 2010, with the following syntax keywords "education or schooling and iowa gambling task" or "somatic marker" "age" or "aging" and "iowa gambling task" or "somatic marker"; and, "sex" or "gender" and "iowa gambling task" or "somatic marker". among the abstracts which fulfilled the inclusion criteria, 9 full-text papers were analyzed for the age factor, 3 papers for education and 6 for gender. only a few studies were found about age, education and gender and their impact on igt performance. the most studied variable was age. the majority of the studies showed that young adults presented better learning during the task when compared to elderly ones, but there were no differences regarding the total igt score. when it comes to education few studies were found, and as regards gender, the results were contradictory. in this way the need of more studies with healthy samples which can clarify the role of age, schooling and gender in the decision making process evaluated by igt was highlighted.