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Psychological and neuroscientific gambling research   Logo

The Department of Biological Psychology (Prof. Dr. Jan Peters) at the Department of Psychology, University of Cologne, has been investigating the neural, physiological, and computational mechanisms involved in gambling and gambling disorder for many years. Specific research focuses include:

  • Learning and decision processes in the context of gambling disorder
  • Context and environmental effects on problematic gambling behavior
  • Temporal discounting and impulse control

Are you a player and interested in participating in one of our neuroscientific or psychological studies or want information about ongoing studies? In that case, please contact dranfile.elsner@uni-koeln.de. Please observe our data protection guidelines when reaching out (https://www.hf.uni-koeln.de/39854).

Current Publications on Gambling Disorder:

Peters, J. (2025). A neurocomputational account of multi-line electronic gambling machines. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Smith, E., Peters, J., Reiter, N. (2024). Automatic detection of problem gambling signs from online texts using large language models. PLoS Digital Health, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pdig.0000605

Wiehler, A. & Peters, J. (2024). Decomposition of Reinforcement Learning Deficits in Disordered Gambling via Drift Diffusion Modeling and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Computational Psychiatry, 8(1): 23-45.

Smith, E., Michalski, S., Knauth, K., Kaspar, K., Reiter, N., Peters, J. (2023). Large-scale web scraping for problem gambling research: a case study of COVID-19 lockdown effects in Germany. Journal of Gambling Studies. doi: 10.1007/s10899-023-10187-1

Wagner, B., Mathar, D., Peters, J. (2022). Gambling environment exposure increases temporal discounting but improves model-based control in regular slot-machine gamblers. Computational Psychiatry, 6(1): 142 – 165.

Wiehler, A., Chakroun, K., Peters, J. (2021). Attenuated directed exploration during reinforcement learning in gambling disorder. Journal of Neuroscience, 41(11): 2512-2522.

For a complete list of publications from the Department of Biological Psychology, please click here.

Funding:

Our research in this field is funded through institutional resources and third-party projects from the German Research Foundation (DFG).