Heart Rate Variability Analysis in Iowa Gambling Task: A Glimpse of Patterns Hidden in QRS Complex

Abstract—Emotion plays an important role in decision making. Previous studies aimed on studying the relationship between Inter Beat Intervals (IBIs) obtained from Electrocardiogram (ECG), and the decisions made by subject, recorded in Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). This paper is inline of previous studies. We found that the results of between subject analyses indicate that most subjects tend to make advantageous decisions rather than disadvantageous decisions when their heart rate slows down (p < 0.001). On the other hand, for within subject analysis, through the difference of IBIs, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was used and the obtained classification accuracy on the outcome of subjects ’ decisions exceeds 65 % (higher than 50%, which stands for guessing at random, p < 0.05). The outcome suggests the existence of relationship between the performance of human decision making and the psychophysiological activities appeared right before they made the decisions. This paper furthermore proposed a novel approach of analyzing patterns hidden in QRS complex, which provides further information than IBIs