In games of chance, a near miss is said to occur when feedback for what is otherwise a loss approximates a win. For instance, obtaining “cherry-cherry-lemon” on a slot machine could be considered a near miss. Sixty-six years after B. F. Skinner first proposed the idea that near-miss events might be reinforcing continued play in slot machines, belief in this ‘near-miss effect’ has remained strong despite the troublesome experimental literature. The present study reviewed and experimentally assessed the near-miss effect as it pertains to the frequency of the gambling response. Experiment 1 used a tightly controlled resistance-to-extinction procedure in pigeons to evaluate the putative reinforcing effect of near misses relative to a control “far-miss” reel pattern. Experiment 2 extended Experiment 1’s procedure to human participants. The results of both experiments failed to support the near-miss effect hypothesis. Experiment 3 used a further simplified procedure to assess the validity of the resistance-to-extinction paradigm when a probable conditional reinforcer was present on the reel stimuli. Although a clear discriminative function was obtained from the reel, subsequent testing in extinction revealed no reinforcing function of this stimulus.

When deciding between different courses of action, both the potential outcomes and the costs of making a choice should be considered. To date, most studies of risk-sensitive choice have focused on the probability of different reward amounts. Here we studied choice between options that varied in the riskiness of the effort (number of responses) required. People made repeated choices between pairs of options that required them to click different numbers of sequentially presented response circles. Easy (low effort) options led to small numbers of response circles, whereas hard (high effort) options led to larger numbers of response circles. For both easy and hard options, safe options led to a fixed effort, whereas risky options led to variable effort that, with a 50/50 chance, required more or less effort. Participants who showed a preference for easier over harder options (63% in Experiment 1 and 93% in Experiment 2) were risk averse overall. Participants were more risk averse for decisions involving hard options than for decisions involving easy options. On subsequent memory tests, people most readily recalled the hardest outcome, and they overestimated its frequency of occurrence. Strikingly, memory for the effort associated with each risky option strongly correlated with risky choices for both easy-effort and hard-effort choices, suggesting that the memory may determine choices based on risky effort.