A Final Post

The training is complete! Monica has returned to free feed, eating as much food as she wants, which I'm sure she has been taking full advantage of in the past 48 hours!

Training Monica has been a great experience! I loved having a pet at school to take care of and play with.  I had know idea how easy it was going to be to train her.  Using the information I learned during class and while reading Pryor's book, shaping Monica's behavior to press the bar was not hard at all!
As for improvement of the project, I have no suggestions.  I didn't run into any problems while training.  Every step of the training process was explained throughly, so I did not have any confusion.
This most surprising thing I learned during training was how I applied the concepts we learned in class.  The training helped me to understand and apply the concepts to an actual experience I had.   This was surprising for me because I do not usually think of concepts learned in my classes as applying to me in the real world.  I just learn them for the test and never think about them again, but I will never forget the concepts of shaping, schedules of reinforcement, and extinction after spending so much time practicing them.

Before starting this project, I did not understand how a rat could be trained.  Rats are so small and do not need to be petted and loved like dogs.  I did not know how we could communicate to the rats what behavior we wanted them to preform.  I quickly found that rats are easy to train.  Even though they do not find affection reinforcing and they do not want to play with you, they can still be trained using a primary reinforcer, food.

Summary Table of my Training Sessions

Responses During Training

This table and chart show the average number of times Monica pressed the bar at each reinforcement schedule in a 30 minute training session.  For the training sessions that were not 30 minutes long, I used proportions to calculate the number of responses that would have occurred if Monica continued to press the bar at the same rate for the remaining portion of the 30 minutes.

Extinction - Day 14 & 15

On day 14 and 15 of training, Monica did not receive any reinforcement for pressing the bar in order to extinguish the previously learned behavior.  This process is known as extinction.  When Monica entered the operant box, she went directly to the bar and began pressing.  After every few presses, she would stop and sniff the magazine in search of her reward.  Monica showed signs of frustration after about 40 presses and moved to the opposite corner of the box where she sniffed and gazed out of the clear wall.  

At first she spent about 30 seconds not paying attention to the bar and sitting in the opposite corner, but as the session continued, she completed longer time periods without pressing the bar.  On one occasion, Monica stared out of the box for two minutes straight, completely ignoring the bar and magazine.  

An extinction burst is the abrupt increase in a previously reinforced behavior after the reinforcement is removed.  The extinction burst was evident at the beginning of both extinction training sessions.  In the first five minutes, she pressed the bar 174 times on day 14 and 117 on day 15.  Monica's bar pressing behavior increased when her reinforcement was removed.   She also exhibited frustration by being more aggressive towards the bar.  As seen in the video clip, she exhorts great effort to press the bar and spins around the sides trying to figure out how to get reinforced.

Spontaneous recovery occurs when an organism is put back in a training situation and an extinguished behavior reappears.  I did not see this occur with Monica.  In the last minute interval on day 14, she pressed the bar 55 times; therefore, I do not believe that the behavior was yet extinguished.  During the same interval on day 15, she only pressed the lever 7 times, This drastic decrease in the bar pressing behavior shows that the behavior has been extinguished.  I believe that if Monica is placed in the operant box in the near future, spontaneous recovery would occur; she would press the bar again.

Fixed Ratio

The highest fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement I attained with Monica was FR10.  We progressed through the FR schedules quickly, training at each schedule for only one day.  Every time Monica went in the operant box, she immediately began pressing the bar.  After FR1, Monica received at least 100 pellets per training session.  On the last fixed ratio schedule, FR10, she pressed the lever 1008 times!  As we went through the different schedules, Monica pressed the bar more times in order to get the same amount of reinforcements.  During the higher schedules, she had longer postreinforcement pauses, when she would roam around and stick her nose through the corner of the box.  She made up for the longer time she spent between pressing sessions by pressing the lever continuously for longer periods of time.  
In the following cumulative records from Monica's FR3 and FR10 training days, the steep slope shows how often she was pressing the bar.  On the higher levels when she pressed the bar more, and thus, the slope is steeper.  The graph resets at 0 after every 100 bar presses.  

Cumulative Record Day 6 - FR3

Cumulative Record Day 9 - FR10

Weight Chart

Monica v. Sniffy

The process of shaping my virtual rat, Sniffy, and my real rat, Monica, was the same.  I spent two sessions, 52:20 total time, shaping Monica.  This elapsed time does not include day 4, which began with shaping, but for the majority of the time Monica was on an FR1 schedule.  Sniffy did not take as long to shape, about 45 minutes.  The slope of the cumulative record from day 3 is not steep which means that Monica did not press the bar very often.

Cumulative Record for Day 3 - Shaping

Magazine training Monica was easier than magazine training Sniffy.  This may have been because I had no idea what I was doing when I started with Sniffy or that Dr. Trench assisted me in training Monica.  Monica offered a wider variety of behaviors than Sniffy, which made it easier to for her to make the connection with the sound and the magazine.  The wide variety of behaviors Monica demonstrated also helped me in the shaping process.  I was able to reinforce numerous behaviors that encouraged her to remain in the back right corner near the bar.  My Sniffy training was not broken into two training sessions.  I was able to finish shaping in one sitting whereas Monica shaping occurred on multiple days and across a weekend.

Training Monica I learned how to transition from magazine training to shaping to a FR1 schedule of reinforcement.  Before each of the parts were completed, I was working on the next.  It was a back and forth process because I would reinforce more advanced behaviors and then have to regress to reinforcing more simple behaviors.  In Sniffy, each part of training had to be completed before you could progress to the next level.  Sniffy was less realistic; however, the forced division of the training sessions also helped my learning.  When the steps were separated, I was able to better understand what was included in each one.

In the future Dr. Trench should continue to use both Sniffy and real rats.  Sniffy helps prepare for the real rat, and the real rat helps to demonstrate how the concepts are applied in real world training, not just simulated on a computer.