Remy's Training-Day 2

February 23, 2016.

Today my goal was to finish magazine training Remy and also to begin shaping her. The purpose for the day's session was to teach Remy to associate the clicking sound and light switching off with receiving food in the magazine AND to associate a bar press with receiving food. This time, I put a soundproof cover on the front of the box to keep her from being spooked and/or distracted so easily (below). I watched her behaviors through the small window and reinforced her according to her behaviors during the session.

Today, she was food deprived to about 92% of her starting weight and weighed 203 grams. Our training session began at 4:30 PM. My procedure for this training session began the same way as yesterday while I attempted to magazine train Remy. I reinforced her for time spent near the food magazine at first. Later, I reinforced her for turning her head towards the bar after eating from the food magazine or for time spent exploring the area of the cage near the bar. I also reinforced her for touching the bar with her paw, gripping the bar, and also gave her bonus rewards a few times when she pressed the bar herself. The training session continued for 30 minutes and 37 reinforcements, an increase from yesterday. Remy also pressed the bar 4 times.

The results of today's training session were much more optimistic than the ones from yesterday!
Within the first 5 minutes, Remy seemed to have recalled what we did in our first session, showing that she associated the clicking sound and the light switching off with receiving food in the magazine. She went to the food magazine almost immediately every time I released a pellet. With respec to the bar, however, she only managed to press it 4 times in our 30 minute session, so I will continue shaping her in tomorrow's training session. Her cumulative record, indicating how many times I reinforced her (vertical tick marks on graph) and how many times she pressed the bar (movement on the y-axis), is shown below.

Discussion:

Putting the front cover on the box for this session was instrumental in getting Remy to calm down and interact with the food magazine and the bar more. She appeared to be magazine trained about 5 minutes into the session. Between minute 10 and minute 20, Remy began to be increasingly interested in the bar--she started putting her paws on it and wrapping them around it, even biting it at times! She doesn't seem to quite understand that pressing the bar gets her food yet; either that, or she is not very comfortable with it yet. For the last third of the training session, Remy started to lose interest in being rewarded and spent an increasing amount of time exploring the cage. She also spent a lot of time chewing and sniffing on the light (above the bar), groomed herself more, and spent more time in the part of the box without the bar and the magazine. 

When I took her out at the end of the session, she did not want to leave, so hopefully that will be a good sign for tomorrow's training!

-Jessica

Remy's Training-Day 1

February 22, 2016.

Today my goal was to magazine train Remy. Similar to the magazine training protocol for Sniffy, the purpose for the day was to teach Remy to associate a clicking sound and a light switching off with receiving food in the magazine.

  

Here are a few more pictures of her! On her first day of training, she was approximately 93% of her starting body weight, weighing 207 grams (7 grams above her target weight). For this first training session, I partnered with Dr. Trench, and we met at 2:00 PM.

My methodology for Day 1 was to set the operant box computer program for a manual shaping, meaning that even if Remy pressed the bar, I would have to manually reinforce her. I chose to do this so that we could focus on one task at a time--the first task being getting Remy interested in the food and associating the clicking sound and the light switching off in the chamber with receiving food in the magazine. 

When Remy faced the magazine or got close to it, I reinforced her. But, as with Sniffy, it took time to pique her interest, and by the end I was not convinced that she was successfully magazine trained. Training continued nonetheless for about 24 minutes and 22 reinforcements.

Discussion:

First of all, I don't think Remy was as food motivated as I would have liked her to be. She was over her target weight and had actually gained 9 grams overnight the day before our first training. So, for the first 5-10 minutes, Remy showed no interest in the pellets at all and when she finally ate them, she was still distracted, which brings me to the other issue of the day. Remy is also very skittish. This worked against us in today's session because she spent much of her time grooming, freezing, or trying to escape the box altogether. In the next training session, I plan to put a cover on the front of the box that will block out noise and also prevent Remy from being scared due to any sudden movements, which will hopefully allow her to focus better on training.

Day 1 of training Remy was only remotely like training Sniffy and not nearly as simple. Part of the reason for this is likely because our textbooks and the Sniffy computer program, while they address the randomness of behavior, don't talk much about individual rat personalities or how much time the whole process takes. Descriptions can be summed up in a few paragraphs but they aren't as complex as real-life training situations. 

Regardless, for Day 2, I plan to continue magazine training and to begin shaping!

-Jessica

Training Sniffy

February 17, 2016.

As you may remember from my previous post, not only do I have a real rat named Remy for my Learning Psychology class, I also have a virtual rat named Sniffy (3.0)! Below are a couple of pictures of Sniffy eating from the food magazine (left) and rearing (right).

 

In order to prepare us for training our real rats, I and each of my classmates downloaded Sniffy. 

My first task was to magazine train this little lady. Magazine training in the case of Sniffy is to train her to associate a clicking sound that is produced by me, the trainer, pressing the space bar with receiving food in the magazine (pictured above).  This part is crucial to the training process because without this association, reinforcing Sniffy for behaviors I want would be meaningless.

After magazine training, my task was to train Sniffy to press the bar (silver; pictured above the food magazine). The bar dispenses food pellets without me having to do anything, but Sniffy is not aware of the association between the bar and the food dispensing yet. That is what shaping will eventually accomplish.

Magazine training-

I chose to reinforce Sniffy whenever she came close to the food magazine. The only problem is that she just sort of ambles around the operant box, grooming herself, rearing, and doing other rat-like things. Only every once in awhile would she even look in the direction of the food magazine. In these moments, my timing of reinforcement was critical--the closer she was to the magazine, the better. Sometimes by the time I released the food pellet, Sniffy was already walking away and it would take a few more seconds before she even realized that there was food, and then she would amble over to the magazine again. These delays were frustrating. 

Sniffy's curiosity and exploration continued throughout the magazine training task. Sometimes a breakthrough (at about the halfway point according to Operant Associations Mind Window on the computer program) would occur and Sniffy would linger by the the magazine after previously receiving a food pellet. I would take advantage of these time by rapidly releasing several more food pellets. This strengthened Sniffy's association of the clicking sound and receiving food from the magazine. The stronger this association was, the quicker Sniffy's response time to the magazine was, even if she was on the other side of the chamber. 

It took about 30 minutes and way more than 30 food pellets to magazine train Sniffy, so I saved a file and returned to shaping another day.

Shaping-

In order to shape Sniffy to eventually press the lever, I had to reinforce her behaviors when she was facing the bar, standing near the bar, or rearing up on the bar. Because Sniffy had previously been magazine trained (above), she realized that she was doing behaviors I liked when she heard the clicking sound and was rewarded with food. The behaviors I liked, then, became more and more frequent until Sniffy began pressing the bar. When she pressed the bar, this behavior was automatically reinforced, as pressing it dispensed a food pellet. 

Below is a video a few seconds long of Sniffy's behavior (in general) while first learning the result of pressing the bar:

Then, Sniffy began to associate a bar press with receiving food. Once she figured this out, I just sat back and watched her continuously press the bar until the association was at the maximum level on the Operant Associations Mind Window. The whole process took about an hour and a half, but much of the time was spent just watching Sniffy press the bar over and over. 

Sniffy post-shaping video:

The cumulative record of Sniffy's shaping is below. As you can see, on a continuous reinforcement schedule (or FR1), the behavior is increasing over time because at EVERY bar press, Sniffy receives food.

Now that Sniffy has been shaped, I can put her on a schedule of reinforcement and eventually learn how to extinguish the bar pressing behavior. Stay tuned!

-Jessica

Hello readers!

This blog will detail my experiences training both the virtual rat, Sniffy, and a real rat, Remy, for my Psychology of Learning lab. I'm sure we will have good times and bad times, all of which you will get to read about throughout the course of the semester!

In our lab this week (February 10, 2016), we got to hold our rats for the first time and assign them to their own individual cages. Before this class, I have only had one other experience with rats. We used them for a project in my Research Methods class, measuring their athletic performance via how many times they ran around in a running wheel over a short time period. However, one rat in particular was having too much fun in the cage with the wheel and proceeded to bite me when I tried to pick her up to put her back in the holding cage.

Despite this experience, I chose this course because I thought it would be fun to learn how to train an animal using conditioning techniques that we will be learning about in lecture. My first time holding my rat, she seemed a little skittish and very squirmy; she only stayed in my hands for about 10 seconds before crawling up my shirt and onto my shoulder, at which point my professor (Dr. Trench) saved her from what I'm sure would have been a graceful leap onto the floor. At this point, I hadn't yet chosen a name for her.

The next day, I returned to handle my rat and decided to give her the name Remy. Most people who know the name Remy know it from the movie Ratatouille. It is a name of French origins that is used for both males and females, and I thought it would be fitting since I have taken a few French classes over the last couple of years and loved them. Besides, I couldn't keep calling her "my rat" all semester.

I have been back to handle Remy every day since our last lab. My initial impressions haven't changed much except that I am perhaps a bit more confident about handling her and interacting with her. While she has still been very squirmy for these first couple of days and sometimes barely stayed in my hands for more than a few seconds before leaping back into the cage, I finally got a picture with her yesterday.

She seems to be warming up to me nicely! The only problem is that she is very curious and has tried to climb out of the cage a few times to explore the holding room... maybe she just wants a running wheel like that other rat from a couple of years ago.

Stay tuned for more of my adventures with Remy and my introduction to Sniffy!

-Jessica