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Thought 2 - Rat Gambling

Warning: Do NOT read this if you are offended by animal experiments.

What started out as an conversation about probability and statistics, lead to gambling, then to whether you can study gambling addiction in a controlled lab. This conversation then got a bit out of hand. What follows is how this might be accomplished, and a history of the conversation.

First you train a rat to press a lever that dispenses food or a treat or some other reward. Once this is established, you then introduce a penalty for "losing" on a gamble. This could take the form of a mild shock. Randomly either give the animal a reward or punishment with about a 50/50 ratio. Then slowly change the percentage over to increasingly more punishments than rewards until the rat no longer presses the button, it has learned that gambling is not a good idea.

Well that seemed like a decent start, but then we discovered that we were missing the element of a jackpot. This lead to either wiring up the rat's pleasure center of the brain, or dispensing a dopamine releasing drug, like say cocaine. Then add the "jackpot", into the reward with a very small probability, but make it show up early so that the rat is always sort of "chasing the dragon". Then find out how the "jackpot" alters the rat's cutoff point.

Anyway, it's just a thought.

Comments

Inky Neverwhere said…
This makes me think that part of the problem with human gambling addicts is that they don't associate the overall loss with an immediate negative consequence. Now, if the casino machines delivered an electric shock along with the loss of a quarter, nickel, token...
July 28, 2008 at 2:05 PM
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