Shaping Day 2

Date: 9/23/13

Start Time: 2:06

End Time: 2:36

Session Duration: 30:00

Number of Bar Presses: 24

Total Number of Reinforcements: 93

Snickerpuss’ Weight: 213 grams

Goal:

Our goal was to continue shaping Snickerpuss to press the bar. Today we did not want to reinforce Nicky’s behavior of being near the lever, but rather we wanted to reinforce Nicky putting her paws on the lever. We stuck with our previous definition of success; for shaping to be successful, Nicky had to press the lever more times than we rewarded her during the training session.

Procedure:

Nicky weighed 213 grams, 4 grams above her target weight. In order to cut her weight to her target weight of 209 grams, we will reduce the amount of food we feed her in the future.

For the third day of training we used the hand switch to deliver rewards to Nicky for behavior we wanted to reinforce as well as allowing Nicky to press the lever to earn rewards for herself. We quickly reinforced behavior from the previous training session that was beneficial but wanted to focus on having her put her paws on the lever and eventually press the lever.

Results:

Nicky pressed the lever 24 times and we manually reinforced her behavior 69 times, for a total of 93 reinforcements for the training session. While Nicky’s performance was markedly better than yesterday, she still did not achieve the goal of pressing the lever more times than we manually reinforced her. For this reason we did not consider today’s shaping session to be a success.

Discussion:

            In today’s session Nicky showed signs of learning to press the lever when compared to the last training session. Nicky continued to show signs of frustration by engaging in self-grooming behavior. She also seems to be continuously distracted by the front left corner of the operant box, where she spends a lot of time with her nose buried into the corner. Today’s improvement makes Olivia and I believe that yesterday’s regression was a result of the long weekend and the lack of training over the weekend. Nicky’s quick learning compared to yesterday makes us optimistic she will move on to reinforcement schedules soon. While we are happy with her improvement, we plan on holding another shaping session tomorrow to solidify the desired behavior before we move on to the Fixed Ration One (FR-1) schedule. 

                      Cumulative Record for Shaping Day 2