Pulling Hair for Lever Pressing

Our biggest problem during Snickerpuss’ training was the initial process of shaping her to lever press. It took three days of training to successfully finish shaping according to our goal, which was to have Nicky press the lever more times than we manually rewarded her during the training session. Nicky was quickly putting both of her front paws on top of the lever, but she would not press down on it – she seemed content to just sit on it and wait for a reward to come. The number of times in which Nicky stood on top of the lever without pressing it was frustrating, and it seemed like we were pulling our hair out trying to get her to just press down on the lever. This problem was likely a result of trainer behavior rather than trainee behavior and definitely not a problem with the operant box. We had to ask Dr. Trench what was the best way to fix this behavior because we could not seem to get Nicky to press the lever on her own. Going forward, we were only going to reinforce Nicky 5 times for each behavior that was necessary for lever pressing, but was not itself lever pressing. An example of this behavior would be rearing up or placing her front paws on the lever without pressing. Initially, Nicky became frustrated that she wasn’t being rewarded for behavior that had previously resulted in rewards, but she soon learned that she had to do more each time to be rewarded. Thankfully, this technique worked and on the third day of shaping Nicky successfully completed the goal we had set for her of pressing the lever more times than we manually rewarded her. To avoid this behavior before it became a problem we could have rewarded Nicky less at the beginning of training for behavior that was not lever pressing. These mistakes were likely a result of inexperience on Olivia and I’s part, as they were quickly resolved when we got advice from an experienced trainer. Our training may have been improved if we had been able to shape Nicky quicker, which would have allowed us two extra training days where we could have attempted alternate schedules of reinforcement, such as a fixed interval schedule or a variable ratio schedule. Overall, our training experience was successful, as Nicky learned how to respond to all schedules of reinforcement she was faced with.