My first experience with
Sniffy was an incredibly frustrating one. Magazine training went fairly well,
as I gradually reinforced Sniffy to stay close to the food hopper. Rewarding
Sniffy for staying close to the hopper was not hard, just monotonous after a
while. At the beginning of magazine training, when Sniffy did something good
for the first time, I would try to reward him with two treats right away to
emphasize that this was the behavior I desired. I spent about 20 minutes
magazine training Sniffy.
A picture of the Cumulative Record for Magazine
Training.
As monotonous as magazine
training was, shaping Sniffy to press the bar was much more frustrating. The
first time I missed two reinforcements for pressing the bar and Sniffy went on
without even going close to the bar again for a quite a while. Realizing all
progress was lost for that attempt, I had to restart the shaping process. The
second time around I was more careful to reinforce the appropriate behaviors
immediately as they occurred. Even with a good reinforcement reaction time,
shaping Sniffy to press the bar was a long process. After what seemed like
hours, Sniffy began to press the bar more frequently and the reward process
seemed to have an effect. Once Sniffy had learned that pressing the bar
repeatedly yielded a reward, he began pressing the bar in rapid succession. I
spent about 50 minutes shaping Sniffy to press the bar.
Pictures of the Cumulative Record for Shaping to
Bar Press.
Setting Sniffy up on a
Reinforcement Schedule was also relatively easy. I chose to set him up on an
FI-10 schedule (Fixed Interval - 10), so that each successful bar press after
the 10 second interval was up would result in a reward for Sniffy. This process
went by very quickly because I was able to isolate Sniffy and speed up the
time; I spent only about 2 minutes on this exercise.
The process of Extinction
was by far the easiest of the Sniffy process. Once the correct settings were
turned on, I isolated Sniffy to speed up the process of extinction and we were
done in hardly any time. I spent less than 5 minutes on the extinction
exercise.
A picture of the Cumulative Record for Extinction.
Once I completed Sniffy's
virtual training I realized how much patience would be required in order to
train Snickerpuss in the lab. Training the rats, both virtual and real, makes
me feel like an overbearing parent who just wants to give their child that
extra nudge so they are successful.
