WHAT MODULATES THE ACHIEVEMENT IN AN IN-FERENTIAL, VISUO-SPATIAL ENVIRONMENT

In inferential environments, people make decisions on the base of outcomes predictions: the more they become ac- quainted, the more the levels of confidence increase. At the moment, the role of psychological traits or superior cognitive functions is still unclear. Through a novel visuo- spatial decision-making task we begin to disentangle the role of these factors: due to the stocastic nature of the task, we assumed that personality traits affect achieve- ments more than intelligence. Forty-two healthy partici- pants performed a visuo-spatial decision-making task de- manding for profit maximization, and responded to Raven- APM, EPQr and STAI tests. No effects of anxiety or personality emerged. Only Raven guided task performance: par- ticipants with higher score maximized their responses more than who showed lower, but still within normality, score. However, this emerged only within a variability threshold. The present experiment formalizes how envi-ronmental variability constrains the role of intelligence in extracting information from a visuo-spatial inferential task.