First Experience with Sniffy the Virtual Rat

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.

 A picture of the Cumulative Record for Reinforcement Schedule (FI-10).

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.