Slot machines are high-tech, captivating games that utilize smart psychological strategies to keep players engrossed. Offering captivating visuals, captivating music, and intriguing stories that draw players in and motivate them to play more for longer.
Utilizing a simulator, we tested the effects of audiovisual feedback on skin conductance responses to wins, losses-disguised-as-wins, and bonus features. Pupils responded positively to reinforcement of winning outcomes but not to losses.
Visual stimuli
With their bright lights and cheerful sounds, slot machines can be highly addictive. Offering players an escape from reality while creating the possibility of big winnings further enhances the appeal. Therefore, understanding the psychology of slot machine gambling and conducting psychological research are vital in order to address problem gambling effectively.
Participants played a multiline slot machine simulator that displayed credits in a credit window and provided audiovisual feedback for wins and losses-disguised-as-wins (LDWs). When played with sound on, these events were also accompanied by visual celebratory feedback as well as custom-created rolling sounds and winning jingles; however, exact value of wins or LDWs weren’t revealed until at the end of outcome-related audiovisual feedback; therefore pupillary dilation may not always be detectable when testing results related to reinforcing outcome types.
Sound stimuli
This experiment examined the effects of sound on arousal in players playing multiline slot machines. Our findings demonstrated that sounds had an impactful impact both psychophysically and subjectively, increasing skin conductance responses significantly when sound was on and most participants preferring winning situations when associated with sound cues.
Standard multiline slot machine games feature celebratory feedback upon winning outcomes while losing outcomes are generally silent. A significant number of spins, however, return less than what was bet by the player (e.g. they lose 90 cents back on one line) which are known as Losses Disguised as Wins (LDWs).
Recent research has demonstrated that when these LDWs are coupled with positive sounds in standard games, players interpret them as wins with PRPs closely aligned to their size. To investigate whether adding negative sounds might alter this outcome encoding process, we conducted two Experiments 1 and 2. By pairing LDWs with either positive or negative sounds we found that including negative sounds reduced celebratory feedback frequency while unveiling inconsistencies between visuals and sounds on these LDWs.
Illusion of control
The illusion of control is a cognitive bias in which individuals overestimate how much control they have over events beyond their control, leading them to make superstitious assumptions, gamble excessively or believe paranormal concepts as fact. Furthermore, this misconception prevents rational decisions when investing in financial markets.
Illusions of control often occur because people fail to identify the causal relationships between their actions and outcomes, and those outcomes. Studies have revealed that people may be more prone to illusions of control in familiar environments; for example, card game experiment participants playing against less confident confederates were willing to wager more money than when facing more experienced adversary opponents.
The perception of control can be affected by multiple factors, including familiarity with a situation, perceived skill and causal reasoning. Dixon et al. found that gamblers’ responses to winning and losing outcomes became faster with practice while becoming more sensitive to magnitude of wins/losses as evidenced by longer post-reinforcement pauses following winning outcomes.
Close-to-miss results
Refining techniques that isolate the effects of cognitive activity versus light input on pupil responses would be helpful for identifying changes in arousal levels and other psychophysiological responses to slot machine gambling, including pupillometry measures that could index surprise, excitement or any other psychologically relevant responses present in modern slot machine games.
Participants participated in this experiment by viewing the credits and win windows of two video slots, Buffalo Spirit and Ice Empress, both with and without sound. When an audiovisual feedback event occurred related to outcomes shown in these windows, luminance increased or decreased accordingly; however this didn’t reflect an accurate correlation to actual value displayed within these windows.
Figure 6 indicates that luminance manipulations did indeed result in consistent pupillary responses; however, these should be interpreted with caution due to using digital images instead of real slot machines for this experiment.