An animal model of gambling in a laboratory-based token economy - Project Summary
While much is known about the prevalence, incidence and risk factors associated with
problem gambling at the population level, less is known about the nature of the
relationships between risk factors and gambling, as well as the actual behavioral
mechanisms that govern the development and maintenance of gambling. The present
research aims to develop and test an innovative animal model of slot machine gambling
with pigeons using a token economy. The rigorous control permitted by laboratory
methods enables an experimental investigation of the development and maintenance of
gambling behavior, as well as for testing some of the key hypotheses advanced to
account for gambling. The research grows out of recent grant-funded work in our
laboratory that demonstrates the utility of studying economic decisions in a self-
contained miniature economy from a behavioral economic perspective. The present
research would extend these methods and theoretical concepts to gambling decisions,
bringing sophisticated experimental and quantitative techniques to bear on this critically
important but poorly understood phenomenon. More specifically, the project consists of
an interrelated series of experiments that seeks to quantify the relationships between
gambling behavior and (a) reward variables (size and probability of wins and losses), (b)
economic variables (wage rate/salary, income, budget, gambling costs), (c) contextual
variables (effects of near-wins and near-losses, the presence/absence of cues and
signals), and (d) social enrichment variables (housing conditions outside the
experiment). In all branches of the project, animals decide whether to earn, accumulate,
spend, or gamble tokens in a self-contained economic environment. The use of token
rewards, a monetary-like currency, provides a more ecologically valid model of gambling
behavior than prior laboratory-based models, and opens the experimental investigation
of gambling in fruitful new directions. Data from these experiments will shed light on the
behavioral mechanisms of gambling, an important first step in elucidating neurochemical
mechanisms and potential clinical applications. Such work is thus of theoretical as well
as applied significance.
