A slot (plural slots) is a narrow opening, usually in the form of a groove or slit. It may be used to admit a coin or other small object, such as a card, or to permit passage of wires or cables. A slot in a computer is a place to store data or programs, and also to attach peripheral devices such as disk drives. In linguistics, a slot is a position in a construction into which a given morpheme or morpheme sequence can fit; compare filler. (sports) In field hockey or ice hockey, the area of the playing field between the last offensive lineman on either side and the blue line. Also known as the pocket or zone.
The term is also applied to the narrow gap in a machine that allows money to be inserted and withdrawn, or to an arrangement of such machines. It can also refer to a specific place on the machine, such as a jackpot or pay-lines. A slot may be located in the cabinet or on the front face of the machine, and can have a number of features such as a lever, button or touchscreen that allows players to interact with it.
Modern multiline slot machines use a random number generator to select symbols on the reels, and a player receives a payout if those symbols line up with a pay line on the machine’s screen. While old mechanical slot machines required a coin to operate, modern machines accept cash or paper tickets with barcodes that are activated by a sensor. The machine then scans the ticket to record its validity, which is verified by a microprocessor and stored in memory. The machine then ejects the ticket and resets itself to the initial state.
Dixon et al. (2009) reported that skin conductance responses (SCRs) of participants to wins and losses in a commercially available slot machine were tightly titrated by the size of the win; larger wins produced greater SCRs than smaller wins. Moreover, they found that players overestimated their number of wins in a sound-on condition but not in a sound-off condition, and that the effects of sounds on arousal were more pronounced than on enjoyment and immersion.
The current study builds on this work by using a novel psychophysiological measure of reward reactivity – the power indices of PRP and force as a function of win size – that gauges how much pleasure is derived from a gambling experience. Unlike other psychophysiological measures that involve cumbersome electrodes and wires, these new measures are gleaned from a participant’s natural play of a multiline slot machine, making them ecologically valid and unobtrusive to the gaming process.
In a laboratory setting, we presented participants with 301 consecutive spins of a single machine and asked them to rate their enjoyment of these plays on an immersive and subjective scale. In addition, a second questionnaire asked about the frequency of their gambling activities over the previous 12 months and was used to assess problem gambling severity.