A narrow opening, notch, groove or slit, often vertical, for admitting something, such as a coin or a letter. Also, a position in a time schedule or on a disk into which a particular type of information can be stored. He has a slot as the chief copy editor on the staff of The Gazette.

The slot machine is the dominant form of gambling in most casinos, and the machines account for a large portion of casino profits. However, a significant subset of gamblers experience severe gambling-related problems (Blaszczynski, Sharpe, Walker, Shannon, and Coughlan, 2005), including mounting debt, issues with relationships, professional difficulties, and involvement in criminal activities to support their gaming habits.

In order to prevent players from leaving their casinos, casino managers must balance the desire to maximize their all-important slots revenue with the need to keep their customers satisfied. They do not want to kill the golden goose by raising the house advantage too much, as this would threaten their overall profits. Therefore, they are constantly adjusting the prices of their slot games, albeit in an opaque manner.

Previous research has found that casino players respond positively to increases in the price of a slot machine, despite having little control over its prices. We extend this finding by showing that increases in the price of a slot machine trigger positive affect variation distinct from reward reactivity. We further show that these effects are mediated by dark flow, and that they may be more general than the mechanisms described in Dixon et al.