Date of Award
5-2020
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Behavior Analysis and Therapy
First Advisor
Dixon, Mark
Second Advisor
Jacobs, Eric
Third Advisor
Koch, Shane
Abstract
Slot machine gambling is the most addictive form of gambling and it is the most popular type of gambling in America (Abbot, 2001). The United States ranks number 1 in annual gambling losses, which equaled to about 40 million dollars (Ghezzi, Lyons, & Dixon, 2000). The present study sought to expand on previous studies by Zlomske & Dixon (2006) and Hoon et al. (2008) by using of contextual cues to teach conditional discrimination relations, one through exclusion, and evaluated the participants' response allocation across four different colored slot machines. Results demonstrated that all of the participants except for one was able to score one correct response when tested on the exclusionary stimuli. Further analysis showed that only a few of the participants' response allocation on the gambling task was altered towards the slot machines that shared the contextual cues of "best" and "greater than".
Access
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