What is a Slot?

A slot is a narrow opening in something, such as a door or a machine. You can also use the word to mean a place in a schedule or program. For example, you might schedule a band for the headline slot at a music festival. The world really is your oyster on a weekend in New York City: you can salsa dance, visit hidden speakeasy bars, see a comedy club or underground punk show, or just stroll around and take it all in.

Conditional reinforcement is thought to play a significant role in gambling behavior. For instance, audio-visual stimuli correlated with winning on a slot machine may acquire conditionally reinforcing properties that encourage further play (Cherkasova et al. 2018). However, a number of recent studies have found that extinction-based treatment fails to eliminate the effects of near misses on gambling persistence. This raises questions about the validity of the putative effect of near-miss density as a conditional reinforcer for gambling behavior.