Slot machines, in particular, are of a variable ratio schedule because people will spend hours sitting there pulling the lever in hopes to score big. In operant conditioning, a variable-ratio schedule is a schedule of reinforcement where a response is reinforced after an unpredictable number of responses. Fixed ratio; variable ratio; constant reward; 4. Playing a slot machine, which provides inconsistently occurring payouts, is an example of a. Fixed ratio; variable interval; fixed interval; constant reward; variable ratio; 5. A child's weekly allowance is an example of a. Constant reward; variable ratio; fixed interval; fixed ratio; variable.
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- Slot Machines Variable Ratio
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A visit to any casino will quickly demonstrate how vices clump together. At any hour of the day or night, many of the customers sitting intently in front of a slot machine will also be smoking cigarettes or drinking a cocktail. Sadly, addictions to these pursuits also tend to go hand in hand, with higher rates of compulsive gambling observed in people addicted to drugs such as cocaine and alcohol. Furthermore, when people perform gambling-like tasks while their brain is scanned by an MRI machine, the games activate areas of the brain also stimulated by drugs of abuse – perhaps accounting for the addiction-like behavior of gamblers.
“If you’ve ever been to a casino, and you watch people using slot machines, you’ll surely have noticed the sense of compulsion to put the next coin in, even though you get no money back most of the time,” said Paul Vezina, professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago.
But does one bad habit truly lead to the other? In a recent paper for the journal Behavioural Brain Research, a team from Vezina’s laboratory offers evidence that the unpredictability crucial to gambling’s appeal can cross over to enhance the effects of abused drugs. By adapting self-administration, a common tool used to model drug-taking in animal research, to partially replicate the random pay-off of a slot machine, graduate student Bryan Singer was able to test whether gambling-like behavior influences a rat’s subsequent response to the drug amphetamine. The result suggests that gambling may have properties similar to a “gateway drug,” as an activity that can increase the abusive potential of drugs.
First of all, how do you simulate the casino experience for a rat? Self-administration – where the animal presses a lever to receive a food or drug reward – is fairly similar to a slot machine to begin with. In a self-administration protocol, the researcher sets the number of lever presses required before the reward is given. A “fixed ratio” of 5 means that the rat would have to hit the lever five times before receiving a food pellet or rewarding hit of cocaine. But with a “variable ratio” setup, unpredictability is introduced into the process. If the variable ratio is set to an average of 5, anywhere from 1 to 10 presses might be required to produce reward, a figure that changes every time like the random number generator of a slot machine. So while the rat does not have anything at stake other than the physical work it takes to hit the lever, it never knows when it will hit the “jackpot.”
“One of the main differences is that for a slot machine there’s a good chance you’re going to lose money, but here there’s little negative aspect,” Singer said. “It’s like a very loose slot machine.”
In this experiment, Singer and co-author John Scott-Railton used the non-caloric sweetener saccharine as a reward – a sweet treat that rats will work to acquire without ever getting full or intoxicated. For 55 days, half of the rats worked for saccharine under fixed ratio conditions and half worked under the variable ratio setup. Then, after a two week break, each rat was given a small dose of amphetamine, and researchers measured their activity as the dosed rats ran around their cage.
Even though the rats in each group received the same amount of saccharine and did the same amount of work during their lever-pressing careers, those exposed to the random rules of the variable ratio exhibited a stronger response to amphetamine. The result suggests that unpredictable rewards may prime the same brain areas hijacked by drugs of abuse, producing a stronger behavioral response – known in the field as sensitization – even upon first exposure to a stimulant drug.
“What this paper is showing is that unpredictable conditions may cause sensitization,” Vezina said. “There are activities that may play just as important a gateway role as drugs, and gambling may be one of them.”
The result fits with classic neurobiological data in primates showing that dopamine neurons in brain reward areas are most excited by unpredictable rewards. More research would be required to determine whether the dopamine neurons of rats in the variable ratio are more excitable relative to their fixed-ratio peers, but that may account for the increased response to amphetamine, Vezina said.
Outside of the laboratory, the findings may also be significant for states (such as Illinois) that are considering opening more casinos to offset budget shortfalls. A neurobiological link between gambling and drug addiction, such that engaging in one makes a person more vulnerable to the other, could mean that the human costs of increased access to casino gambling could outweigh the monetary revenues.
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“When more governments at the city and state levels are arguing for the development and the building of more casinos, this is really something that could place more and more people at risk,” Vezina said. “So the more we understand about this from the behavioral through to the molecular, cellular and biochemical levels, the more we could argue against the type of policy arguments that are being made, and ultimately be in a better position to provide therapeutics.”
Singer BF, Scott-Railton J, & Vezina P (2011). Unpredictable saccharin reinforcement enhances locomotor responding to amphetamine. Behavioural brain research PMID: 21924296
Are Slot Machines A Fixed Ratio Or Variable Ratio Formula
The Rat in Your Slot Machine: Reinforcement Schedules
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Slot Machines Variable Ratio
When gamblers tug at the lever of a slot machine, it is programmed to reward them just often enough and in just the right amount so as to reinforce the lever-pulling behavior - to keep them putting money in. Its effect is so powerful that it even overrides the conscious knowledge most players have that in the long run, the machines are programmed to make net profit off of customers, not give money out.
Slot machine designers know a lot about human behavior, and how it is influenced by experience (learning). They are required by law to give out on average a certain percentage of the amount put in over time (say 90% payout), but the schedule on which a slot machine's reinforcement is delivered is very carefully programmed in and planned (mainly small and somewhat randomly interspersed payoffs). Interestingly, this effective type of reinforcement schedule originally comes from studies with non-human animals.
Are Slot Machines Variable Ratio
When you put rats in a box with a lever, you can set up various contingencies such that pressing the lever releases food to them. You could release food based on a fixed ratio of lever presses (every 10 presses drops some food), or a fixed interval (fifteen seconds must elapse since the last lever press before a new lever press will release food). Alternately, you could do it based on a variable ratio of presses (on average, it will take 10 presses to get food, sometimes more, sometimes less), or a variable interval (on average, food is available for pressing a lever every 15 seconds, but sometimes you have to wait longer, sometimes not as long).
Are Slot Machines A Fixed Ratio Or Variable Ratios
A variable ratio schedule is perhaps the most interesting for the example of slot machines. If you make food available on a variable ratio, you can make sure food is given out often enough that the task remains interesting (i.e. the rat doesn't totally give up on pressing the lever), and you can also make it impossible for the rat to guess exactly when reward is coming (so it won't sit there and count to 10 lever presses and expect food; or it won't sit and wait 15 seconds before pressing the lever). Indeed, since the rat only knows it is somewhere in the range of when a reward might come, but doesn't know exactly on which press it is coming, the rat ends up pressing the lever over and over quite steadily. Other reinforcement schedules do not produce as consistent a pattern of behavior (the response curve is not nearly as steep or consistent).
Slot machine designers learned that lesson well and applied it to humans, for whom the same responses appear given a particular reward contingency. By providing payoffs on a variable ratio schedule, they give out money just often enough that people keep playing, and because it happens on average every X times, rather than exactly every X times, the players cannot anticipate when reward is coming (in which case they won't not bother playing when it was not coming). It is possible that any response could be reinforced, so they are less likely to give up. It keeps them in the seat the longest, tugging that lever repeatedly because it always feels like they are on the verge of getting paid off.
The lesson here is not just meant for gamblers. Our modern life is so full of coercive techniques aimed at controlling our behavior (based on principles of learning and conditioning like those mentioned above) that we have come to expect no less. We recognize that television commercials use tricks to convince us to buy products. We recognize that speech writers and marketing/P-R firms perform careful studies to determine how language and word choice contributes to supporting or extinguishing a behavior. These things still affect our behavior, but recognizing coercive techniques is one of our few defenses to avoiding their invisible pull. And so it is worth it for all of us to pick up a little knowledge about the field of learning and behavior analysis, to better understand how our own behavior is conditioned that we might take back as much control as possible.
Last Updated: 01-25-07