Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Shaping Day 3


Date: 9/24/13
Start Time: 2:02
End Time: 2:32
Session Duration: 30:00
Number of Bar Presses: 73
Total Number of Reinforcements: 130
Snickerpuss’ Weight: 209 grams

Goal:
Our goal was to continue shaping Snickerpuss to press the bar. We continued to us our 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 209 grams, exactly her target weight. To maintain her target weight, we will continue to feed her approximately 7 grams of rat chow, which is what we have found to work best for Nicky.

For the fourth day of training, we continued shaping by using 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. Today we wanted to avoid reinforcing behavior that was not directly related to lever pressing behavior. After a quick refresher for Nicky, she spent the majority of her time next to or on top of the lever.

Results:
Nicky pressed the lever 73 times and we manually reinforced her behavior 57 times, for a total of 130 reinforcements for the training session. Nicky’s performance was much better than the previous two shaping sessions. We considered shaping to be complete after today’s session because Nicky pressed the lever for manual rewards more than we reinforced her for her behavior.

Discussion:
            Finally, success! On the third day of shaping Nicky pressed the lever more than we reinforced her, making today a success. While she continued to show signs of frustration, the amount of frustration behavior (i.e. self grooming, rearing up) was less than in previous days. Due to today’s success, tomorrow we will move on to FR-1 and progress to further schedules of reinforcement once Nicky has mastered each schedule.

Cumulative Record of Shaping Day 3:


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