These two days, I was coming off of a couple of disappointing days of a lack of bar presses after a successful attempt several days before. My goal was to continue shaping Remy so that she would know to associate a bar press with food. My purpose was for this to be the final day of shaping so I could move onto a new schedule of reinforcement.
Each training session began at 4:30 PM. On March 2, Remy weighed in at 89% of her starting weight: 198.8 grams (approximately 1 gram below her target weight). On March 3, she weighed 199.5 grams, which rounded her up to the target weight of 200 grams. I began my procedure by issuing a few reinforcements to get Remy acquainted once again with the operant box. After a few minutes, I no longer needed to issue reinforcements by hand because Remy was pressing the bar fairly steadily. On March 3, I also left the box cover off for the first half of the training session in hopes that I would be able to get a video (below) illustrating her success at being shaped.
The results of these two training sessions resulted in what I considered to be the marks of a successful (finally!) shaping procedure. On March 2, Remy pressed the bar 66 times, and I only had to issue 6 reinforcements by hand--all of which were issued in the first 5 minutes of training. On March 3, she pressed the bar 84 times and 4 reinforcements were issued. Both sessions showed a steady upward rate on the cumulative record, and improvements in performance (measured by number of bar presses) were noted from one day to the next. Yay Remy!!
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| March 2 Cumulative Record |
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| March 3 Cumulative Record |
Discussion:
I considered these two sessions to be a wrap up of the shaping procedure so that I would be able to move Remy to a schedule of reinforcement. These two days, Remy was both very focused and food motivated, spending little time doing things other than pressing the bar. Occasionally she would try to do other things to the bar besides press it and look for reinforcement, and some of those behaviors are in the video below:
Overall, the process took 7 days. I believe that some of this time period can be attributed to the weekend I took off from training while traveling. Remy seemed to be a quick learner, though often distracted by other things inside the operant box that could be stimulating besides the bar and the food magazine (ex-the light). My evidence for the success of shaping can be depicted in a comparison of the cumulative records from Training Day 2 to Training Day 8:
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| day 2 |
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| day 8 |
My experience shaping was similar to our class discussions/materials in the steps necessary for the process. I was able to use small, successive steps to eventually shape Remy to press the bar and was able to use the shaping laws from Pryor's Don't Shoot the Dog. What I didn't expect or what was different was how long the process took me. No texts or readings give a concrete, descriptive time frame for how long shaping is "supposed to" take, probably because the time is incredibly variable based on trainers, individual rats, and other things such as time between training sessions.
It was a very trying process, so I am glad that Remy has now learned to press the bar on her own. I am also excited to move her onto a schedule of reinforcement in our next training session!!
-Jessica
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