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Konami Slot Machines Flashing Subliminal Messages?
shadowspar writes "A Canadian province has pulled several models of Konami slot machines out of service after a news investigation revealed that they briefly flash a jackpot result on the screen every time they are played. Konami claims that the 'subliminal' jackpot images are unintentional and the result of a bug, but other US and Canadian jurisdictions are looking at pulling the machines as well."
Everything in a casino is engineered to encourage you to keep playing. From the obvious (as you said, huge jackpot signs, loud noises when someone wins) - to the not-so-obvious (carpets on the gaming floor are often intentionally ugly to encourage you to look up at the gaming). Have no noticed there are no clocks *anywhere*? That is, except for the computers. If I'm playing blackjack, which I do once or twice a year, I try to grab a 3rd base seat near a computer if I don't have a watch or phone on me.
Some places even have huge fish tanks as you're exiting, some would say to calm you down after a big loss so you're more likely to come back.
Sony ha
Joking aside, subliminal priming is making a comeback in experimental psychology. It was somewhat discredited in the 60s and 70s (i.e., the urban legend about theaters flashing "Drink Coke" on movie screens), but more recent work has uncovered the parameters and boundaries to make it a viable experimental technique. It is typically used in controlled lab situations to study automatic processing of information in isolation from conscious, intentional thought. It's not entirely clear from the research literature whether it would work in this kind of real-life applied context. But it wouldn't be hard for a casino to do the testing to find out.
Yes, because here in the US, we don't want to deal with fills (in spite of the comments about Vegas having slots with coins, properties that actually use them are in the minority, and the coin-filled slots are far in the minority even at those properties) so we just use ticket-out; the slots print out tickets with unique barcodes which are linked to a row in a database. The tickets can be inserted into another machine (ticket-in) or they can be redeemed at the cashier's cage or, on properties which have them, a kiosk. Most properties have at least a redemption kiosk that looks like a bill changer, some have a full kiosk with a screen that lets you redeem points and such as well.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So if you flash jackpot unconsciously you might have a similar but subdued reaction.
n g=r&q=motor+subliminal
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i nalPriming_A&P2002.pdf
This has been proven to be fiction.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but certain subliminal effects are quite real.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&scori
http://jocn.mitpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/
The Neurophysiology of Response Competition: Motor Cortex Activation and Inhibition following Subliminal Response Priming
Peter Praamstra and Ellen Seiss
University of Birmingham, UK
Some widely used tasks in cognitive neuroscience depend on the induction of a response conflict between choice alternatives, involving partial activation of the incorrect response before the correct response is emitted. Although such "conflict tasks" are often used to investigate frontal-lobe-based conflict-monitoring processes, it is not known how response competition evolves in the motor cortex. To investigate the dynamics of motor cortex activation during response competition, we used a subliminal priming task that induced response competition while bypassing preresponse stage processing conflict. Analyses of movement-related EEG potentials supported an interaction between competing responses characterized by reciprocal inhibition. Inhibitory interactions between response channels contribute to the resolution of response conflict. However, the reciprocal inhibition at motor cortex level seemed to operate independent of higher level conflict-monitoring processes, which were relatively insensitive to response conflict induced by subliminal priming. These results elucidate how response conflict causes interference as well as the conditions under which frontal-lobe-based interference control processes are engaged.
http://www.unicog.org/publications/Dehaene_Sublim
The neural bases of subliminal priming
Stanislas Dehaene
Psychologists have long reported that words that are made invisible by forward and
backward masking can nevertheless cause behavioral priming effects. Functional
neuroimaging can now be used to explore the neural bases of masked priming. Subliminal
priming causes reduced activation in multiple areas (fusiform gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, and
motor cortex), in direct correspondence with behavioral manifestations of priming at the
orthographic, semantic, and motor level. This implies that a whole stream of processors can
operate unconsciously. The neural code in each area can be assessed by varying prime-target
relations. A simple mathematical framework is proposed that tentatively relates priming at the
voxel level with the shape of the tuning curves of single neurons in the underlying tissue.
Priming thus provides a general method to study the fine microcode in each brain region (the
'priming method').
I've been developing casino-type games for over 12 years, so I know how they work. This is not at all surprising since slot machines are entirely based on fraud and conning you into believing and 'feeling' like you have a chance of winning - this is just another step in that direction.
The most sinister devices employed by the slot machines are the most fraudulent. I am referring virtual reel mapping and the near miss system. Here's how they work:
Virtual reel mapping works like this: You think that a reel has 24 symbols (12 symbols, 12 blank spots) and conclude that your chances of obtaining any particular combination is 24^3. Not so. What happens is that the slot spins 3 virtual reels, each one consisting of 32 symbols. Positions on the virtual reel are mapped to positions on the physical reel, but guess what, the virtual reels have 8 extra symbols, and they're all mapped to blank spots on the physical reels! This significantly reduces your chances of obtaining a winning combination.
The near-miss system works like this: Considering the virtual reel mapping mechanism described above, the near miss principal works on the basis that the extra 8 blank spots on the virtual wheel are mapped to locations on the physical reel RIGHT NEXT TO the jackpot symbols. That's why you'll see "7 BLANK 7" and "7 7 BLANK" with frightening regularity.
And here's the kicker: There are jackpot symbols on the physical reels that aren't mapped to the virtual reel. Which means that there are symbols on the physical reels that will NEVER EVER show up on the pay line. If that isn't outright fraud, I don't know what is.
If one puts on their cynic hat to appreciate slots from a purely human-psychology point of view, one can truly appreciate how masterfully crafted the whole set-up is. It disgusting and magnificent at the same time.