Do Pigeons Gamble? I Wouldn T Bet Against It?

“Do Pigeons Gamble? I Wouldn’t Bet Against It”
Summary:
This article describes the facts about the psychology of gambling by focusing on the behavioral patterns exhibited by the pathological gamblers under a gambling situation. Basically a man is gambling at whatever point he or she takes the risk of losing money or belongings, and when winning or losing is chosen generally by chance. Gambling includes risking something of value on an indeterminate occasion in hopes of winning something of greater value. Gambling consequently requires three components be available: consideration, chance and prize. A pathological gambler is somebody who can't avoid his or her motivations to gamble. This prompts serious personal and, or, social outcomes. The
Non-human animals like pigeons involve the primary process of decision making because it involve the primitive areas of the brain but it is also believed that pathological gamblers also use the primitive areas of their brain for decision making. For studying the gambling like behavior in pigeons the experimental paradigm of this study was set by using the pigeons in different sessions. Pigeons were granted two choices (red for 10 pellets and green with no pellet). The results were 50% red, 50% green, 20% red and 80% green representing the 100 probability of reinforcement p(rf) for red and 0% p(rf) for green. In other sessions, the yellow and blue lights were used with non-contingent reinforcement of 3 pellets. The results for this session were 50% yellow, 50% blue with 75% reinforced of time; 20% yellow, blue 80% and each was reinforced for 50% of the time. The procedure was made same to human gambling situation by using the alternatives in form of different magnitudes of reinforcement (with money) instead of different probabilities of
There were two groups; one with students who reports the gambling on regular and other group consisting of students who never gamble. Same experimental choices were implied to this experiment but with playing of video games for winning points (10, 0, 30 etc). They found that self-detailed gamblers chose the low-probability, high payoff alternative significantly more regularly (56.5%) than control subjects (23.0%). These results suggest that the suboptimal-decision task designed for use with pigeons might be also be suitable for studying the mechanisms that add to human gambling choices. So the results of this experiment were quite similar to the experiment performed with pigeons. Based on the results, the author should study the gambling like behavior in humans by considering the important factors such as gender type, age, race etc. This will help to understand the gambling-like behavior in more details and in all possible aspects because gender, age and race matters a lot towards the development of gambling-like behavior. All in all, the base of gambling-like behavior is based on impulsivity which may work as a proximal mechanism that increases suboptimal decision in pathological gamblers. Moreover the attentional bias to gambling-related targets generates positive result anticipation, consequently spurring instrumental gambling behavior.