The Troubles with Training

February and March 2016.

With how easy skilled trainers make it sound to use operant conditioning on an animal, I'm guessing a handful of my classmates walked into Psychology of Learning lab just like I did, thinking we were going to conquer the world AND train 22 rats with no problems.

Unfortunately, it didn't really work out like that at all. The rats were all kinds of problematic, and Remy showed some of these problems to me firsthand.

The main problem I had with Remy was when I went out of town over a 3-day weekend just after I believed her to be well on her way to being shaped. I was worried what this kind of time off would do to our training sessions, but I didn't expect her to basically regress back to her baseline of behavior. This was an incredibly frustrating experience because it meant several more days of patience before I really got anywhere. There was little I could do to fix it except keep on trying, and I don't think there was anything I could have done differently given I had no choice but to go out of town that weekend.

Another problem I had with training was that sometimes the box would malfunction when I set it to a protocol. As soon as I realized this had happened (it happened several times), I reset the protocol and began the 30-minute session over again. This didn't really seem to affect Remy, though I worried it would if she happened to press the bar while I was resetting, meaning she wouldn't get reinforced.

A final problem with training Remy was her overall anxiety level. There were definitely times I could point out that resulted in a lack or loss of progress due to the fact that she was often prone to jumping out of her skin for no reason. I think it was just her nature, though. I could have maybe managed this a little better with more handling time, or perhaps trained her when less people were coming in and out of the lab to train their own rats.

I think training went pretty well for the most part. There were little things I could have improved here and there such as more handling time and remaining calm/patient during sessions, but I think throughout the process I was patient and we were generally successful in how far we got.

Au revoir, Skinner box!

-Jessica