Slot Machine Preferences and Self-Rules

The present study was a replication and extension of Zlomke and Dixon (2006) investigating the impact of contextually trained discriminations on slot-machine gambling. In each of two experiments, 20 participants were exposed to two con-currently available slot-machines differing only in color. Thus, Experiment 1 was a replication, while in Experiment 2 we included an instruction to ensure that the participants attended to all of the onscreen stimuli. Following a pretest of slot machine preferences, a nonarbitrary relational training and testing proce-dure was used to establish contextual functions of MORE-THAN and LESS-THAN for two cues. After relational training the participants were exposed to a posttest identical to the pretest. The results of Experiment 1 showed that only a small number of the participants allocated their posttest responses to the slot machine that shared nonarbitrary properties with the contextual cue for MORE-THAN. In Experiment 2, the posttest showed that an increased number of partic-ipants who reported having attended to the contextual stimulus increased their preference to gamble on the yellow slot machine.