Shaping Day 1

Date: 9/19/13

Start Time: 1:58

End Time: 2:28

Session Duration: 30:00

Number of Bar Presses: 5

Total Number of Reinforcements: 78

Snickerpuss’ Weight: 214 grams

Goal:

Our goal was to shape Snickerpuss to press the bar. Today we focused on having Nicky put her paws on the lever, which will lead to bar pressing in the future. In order for shaping to be successful, we wanted Nicky to press the lever more times than we rewarded her during the training session.

Procedure:

Nicky weighed 214 grams, 5 grams above her target weight. This weight gain is likely due to the addition of treats into her diet yesterday from our first day of training.

For the second day of training we used the hand switch to deliver rewards to Nicky for behavior we wanted to reinforce. We began by reinforcing her when she was near the food hopper. Once she stayed near the hopper, we started to reward her for moving into the corner with the lever she would press to dispense food herself. Once she became accustomed to this corner, we began reinforcing her for rearing up onto the lever. We tried to reinforce Nicky for pressing the lever, but she did not press it enough times for this practice to be successful yet.

Results:

Nicky pressed the lever 5 times and we manually reinforced her behavior 73 times, for a total of 78 reinforcements for the training session. We did not consider this shaping session to be a success because Nicky did not press the lever more times than we reinforced her for positive behavior.

Discussion:

            At first glance, Nicky seemed to regress today with only 5 lever presses when compared to yesterday’s magazine training, in which she pressed the lever 16 times. Since yesterday was the first day of training, we attribute her 16 bar presses to inquisitive and exploratory behavior rather than learning. Although she had only 5 lever presses, it seems that Nicky learned to press the lever today because all of the lever presses came during the second half of the training session, after continued shaping and manual reinforcing for desired actions. We will continue shaping Nicky during our next training session before we move on to a Fixed Ratio schedule of reinforcement.

                         Cumulative Record for Day 1 of Shaping Nicky