Pathological gambling is often associated with a number of exaggerated cognitive and behavioral biases that seem relevant to the maintenance of the disorder; however, the experimental investigation into the neural systems that support these biases has only just begun. The data reported by Campbell-Meiklejohn and colleagues (2008) and Clark and colleagues (2009) suggest that it may be possible to specify more precisely the neural machinery that supports cognitive biases in gambling behavior, with the prospect of using such models to understand how dysfunction within mesolimbic circuits and other neuromodulators confers vulnerability to develop problem gambling behavior.
