A narrow depression, groove, notch, or slit, especially one for receiving or admitting something, such as coins or letters. Also used figuratively: (especially in linguistics) A position having a specific grammatical function within a construction, as the slot for a verb or an adjective. (Compare with filler, which is used to describe a word or phrase that does not fit the subject or verb slots of a sentence.) The job of chief copy editor was his slot.
A casino game that involves spinning reels containing symbols and paying out if the symbols line up on a pay line. These games come in many themes and complexities, from traditional three-reel machines to multi-line video slots.
The mechanics of slots are attractive to gamblers for several reasons: first, they provide immediate feedback – wins and losses are almost instantaneous; second, they are arousing, with the frequent appearance of large jackpot payouts accompanied by high-fidelity attention-grabbing music and animations; and third, they employ variable-ratio reinforcement schedules that make the timing of wins and losses unpredictable (Dixon et al., 2019).
Unlike other psychophysiological measures that require cumbersome electrodes and wires to be attached to the player’s body, the two new measures of reward reactivity reported here (PRP and force as a function of win size) are completely unobtrusive. Moreover, because they are obtained from the same players and machines as the previous dark flow measure, they have similar ecological validity. As a result, these measurements should be useful to researchers seeking to understand how slots affect human enjoyment and playability.