What is a Slot?

Slot is a narrow opening, for example a hole that you put coins in to make a machine work. He dropped a coin in the slot and dialled the number.

The term slot is also used to describe a position in a queue or schedule. If he’s lucky, his name might be on the list for the next headline slot at Glastonbury.

Modern slot machines are programmed to generate a sequence of symbols that correlate with the reels’ positions. The machine outputs a pseudo-random number cycle every millisecond, with values in the range of 4.3 billion possible outcomes. For each bet, the machine selects a value from this range and displays the correlated reel positions on its display. The probability that the player will win credits depends on how close the selected symbol is to the jackpot. This sequence of stimuli is often referred to as the “near-miss” effect, and is believed to encourage gambling persistence by conditionally reinforcing losses that appear similar to wins (Cherkasova et al., 2018).

One potential limitation of the present study is that for ethical reasons participants were not required to ante up any personal money for gambling. However, they did risk losing money that they had already earned by continuing to play until the machine stopped paying out winnings (i.e., extinction). As a result, they tended to continue playing longer in the near-miss compared with the far-miss condition. This behavior is consistent with the findings of studies using intermittent reinforcement schedules.