SCIENCE DAILY
ScienceDaily (May 4, 2011) — When a group of gamblers gather around a roulette table, individual players are likely to have different reasons for betting on certain numbers. Some may play a “lucky” number that has given them positive results in the past — a strategy called reinforcement learning. Others may check out the recent history of winning colors or numbers to try and decipher a pattern. Betting on the belief that a certain outcome is “due” based on past events is called the gambler’s fallacy.
Recently, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Ireland’s Trinity College Dublin hedged their bets — and came out winners — when they proposed that a certain region of the brain drives these different types of decision-making behaviors.
“Through our study, we found a difference in activity in a region of the brain called the dorsal striatum depending on whether people were choosing according to reinforcement learning or the gambler’s fallacy,” says John O’Doherty, professor of psychology at Caltech and adjunct professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin. “This finding suggests that the dorsal striatum is particularly involved in driving reinforcement-learning behaviors.”
In addition, the work, described in the April 27 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that people who choose based on the gambler’s fallacy may be doing so because at the time of the choice they are not taking into account what they had previously learned or observed.
Science Daily for more