Gamblers who play a “lucky” number that’s paid off in the past are likely being influenced by a specific brain region linked to learning. The “lucky number” approach is a type of reinforcement learning. A different gambling approach is to 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. “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 the California Institute of Technology (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.”
