Today's training was another lesson in patience. My goal was to continue shaping Remy so that she would know to associate bar press with food. My purpose at this point is to get her back in sync with training so that we can have more productive sessions.
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| Remy's idea of being productive |
Procedure:
Our training session began at 4:30 PM. Remy weighed 198.3, still slightly below her target weight and about 89% of her starting weight. However, Remy was even more unfocused today than yesterday, so I spent a good deal of time trying to entice her to reward herself with by pressing the bar. I followed one of Pryor's 10 Laws of Shaping and "went back to kindergarten" in an effort to remind Remy of what we have now been doing for the past week. By the end of the session I still wasn't seeing any progress, I decided to take the cover off of the box. I figured things couldn't get any more frustrating at that point. The session endured for five more unproductive minutes, for a total of 29 minutes.
The results of this session led me to believe that Remy had regressed back to her starting point, which was baffling to me. She was food motivated this time (unlike yesterday) but too unfocused to do the things that she had previously begun to associate with getting food. She would check the magazine and then go back to sniffing or grooming. When I took the box cover off, she froze for the rest of the session. Remy pressed the bar 4 times and I issued 17 reinforcements (mostly to try to get her attention).
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| Cumulative Record 3/1/2016 |
I am not sure why Remy has been so unmotivated to work on her training. If a rat can have spite, perhaps she is upset with me for leaving for so many days resulting in her not getting any reinforcements for training. She is clearly not yet shaped to press the bar, so I will continue working on this tomorrow.
-Jessica
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