Sniffy VS Remy

March 16, 2016.

I was fortunate enough to get to work with Sniffy the virtual rat and Remy the silly little Long-Evans rat for the first part of this course. Each had its pros and cons, and each taught me (haha) about operant learning!

For starters, shaping in Remy took 3 and a half hours of training in total, while Sniffy took about an hour to shape. I attribute these differences to the fact that Sniffy is a virtual rat that only has a certain number of programmed behaviors, and those DON'T include much of a curiosity or anxiety. Remy, on the other hand, spent a lot of time exploring and being anxious, which took away from time that we spent on training.

Magazine training in each of the rats was not terribly different, and Sniffy gave me a good basis for how exactly to train Remy. In each case I just offered reinforcement when the rat was close to or facing the food magazine, and they both finished magazine training in about 30 minutes without issue.

Shaping Remy, however, (as I alluded to earlier), was much harder than shaping Sniffy. Remy just wasn't all that interested in going near the bar or even on the same side of the box as the bar for a lot of the 3.5 hours we spent shaping. She was much more interested in the front corner of the box, and for a large portion of the shaping procedure, I couldn't do much about that. Sniffy just hung out next to the bar a lot and didn't spend time doing other things, so she got shaped faster.

The strength of using the Sniffy program comes from the fact that it is so simple to address the concepts of operant learning this way. I was able to practice without any problems magazine training, shaping, and schedules of reinforcement without something I had to hold or feed, and that just made it easier. Also, Sniffy was not prone to getting satiated from the food source, whereas Remy could have gotten bored or full and may have at several points in our training.

Here is a Remy's weight chart:

	Remy’s Weight Chart	Target Weight: 200.0 grams
Date	Weight (grams)	Food Given (grams)
2/17	222.0	2.5
2/18	210.0	4.4
2/19	205.7	5.7
2/20	204.5	4.3
2/21	199.5	9.9
2/22	207.0	6.2
2/23	203.0	5.6
2/24	199.8	6.1
2/25*	200.4	17.9
2/26
2/27*	198.2	17.7
2/28
2/29	196.0	7.4
3/1	198.3	8.0
3/2	198.9	7.6
3/3	199.5	9.1
3/4	199.1	9.5
3/5	198.1	10.0
3/6	201.9	9.1
3/7	197.2	10.3
3/8	201.5	9.7
3/9	200.5	9.4
3/10	199.5	10.0
3/11	203.6	8.6
3/12	202.4	8.9
3/13	198.6	10.4
3/14	198.0	10.8
3/15	200.0

*indicates days where Remy was fed the amount for two days to accommodate my absence

Of course, she ended the project exactly at her target weight!!

The biggest benefit of having Remy was learning patience along with the application of the 10 laws of shaping. She forced me to take the knowledge from class and from Sniffy and really use it, which was really cool. It was also really frustrating (see Troubles with Training post). I also enjoyed having an animal to take care of and train at a certain time every day because it really kept me accountable for the process.

Both virtual and live rats should be used in future classes. They are incredibly instrumental in showing us the concepts from class, making that material easy to learn. It was also fun to take care of a real rat and to be able to train a virtual one in any way I wanted to.

Kudos to Dr. Trench for the curriculum; I've really enjoyed it!

-Jessica