Discover Magazine - Slot Machine Near Misses Are Perfectly Tuned to Stoke the Addiction
Using fMRI on people who have no known history of problem gambling, researchers found that the 'reward' sections of the brain light up when slot machines or chance games have 'near misses'. On a game of skill, near misses may signal improvement and thus should contain a level of reward; yet in chance games, near misses are the same as any miss-- chance games have 'hijacked' the reward system for increasing skill. Slot machine makers capitalize on this phenomenon to make near misses roughly 30% of the time, a percentage believed to be optimal.
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