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Pigeons Choose To Gamble In A Categorical Discrimination Task, Nathaniel C. Rice, Elizabeth G. E. Kyonka
Pigeons Choose To Gamble In A Categorical Discrimination Task, Nathaniel C. Rice, Elizabeth G. E. Kyonka
Analysis of Gambling Behavior
In slot-machine play, near wins are stimuli that visually approximate winning stimuli but deliver no reinforcers. In two experiments, a categorical discrimination task was embedded in a concurrent chain to investigate how near wins affect preference for probabilistic versus certain food. Pecking in variable-interval initial links produced access to a fixed-ratio (FR) 1-FR 1-FR 1 chain. When all links were red, the chain was a “win” that produced access to food. A “clear loss” chain involved three green stimuli, and in a “near win,” key colors during successive FR 1 links were red, red, and green. In Experiment 1, the …