Weight chart

Here is Rosie's weight chart throughout training (as we can see from the chart, Rosie's weight fluctuated throughout training from 165.2 grams to 182.0 grams):

Rat: Rosie

Trainers: Brian and Liz

Target weight = 165 g

Date	Weight	Food
9/11	180.0 g	2.4 g
9/12	172.0 g	6.1 g
9/13	171.6 g	4.0 g
9/14	167.9 g	4.0 g
9/15	165.8 g	9.2 g
9/16	167.6 g	8.0 g
9/17	165.2 g	10.0 g
9/18	169.7 g	10.1 g
9/19	168.1 g	10.0 g
9/20	168.1 g	10.1 g
9/21	171.6 g	9.7 g
9/22	171.5 g	9.9 g
9/23	171.2 g	9.1 g
9/24	173.6 g	8.2 g
9/25	177.8 g	7.0 g
9/26	176.2 g	7.9 g
9/27	175.6 g	8.5 g
9/28	178.7 g	7.2 g
9/29	180.5 g	5.9 g
9/30	176.6 g	6.2 g
10/1	176.5 g	6.0 g
10/2	174.5 g	6.1 g
10/3	177.0 g	5.3 g
10/4	176.4 g	4.9 g
10/5	182.0 g	4.0 g
10/6	177.2 g	4.2 g
10/7	168.4 g	7.1 g
10/8	169.0 g	Free Feed

Final post

This was certainly a learning experience! I'm pretty proud of myself for overcoming my initial anxiety about handling a rat, so I'd definitely consider that a personal achievement! Academically, I appreciate the live rat experience - it definitely makes a difference to be able to care for, observe, and learn from a living organism. It makes the notes that we take in class and the words in the Chance and Pryor books come alive.

One thing that I didn't like, and there isn't really a way to avoid this, is the limited amount of time that we had to put Rosie on an alternate partial schedule. We chose FI, but 3 days wasn't really enough to see a significantly different cumulative record. Also, the FI experience made me question whether Rosie was truly learning to change her habits of bar pressing or just pressing and pressing until a reinforcement was delivered. I didn't see Rosie stop pressing the bar or stop checking the food hopper during the time interval and then begin pressing right toward the end of the interval. I think we might have seen that had she had more time on FI. Perhaps future classes should only have the option to stay on FR through the month?

I suppose the most surprising thing was the very first day when Rosie was magazine trained and began the process of shaping so quickly.

Sniffy vs. Rosie

For me, training Sniffy (virtual) and training Rosie (live) were two very different experiences. While I feel that Sniffy was good preparation for Rosie, it was quite different. I would recommend that future classes use Sniffy before magazine training the live rats just so they feel more confident going into their first day in the lab (I know I felt more confident).

Some differences: It seemed like Sniffy took significantly longer to magazine train and shape than did Rosie - with Rosie, we were beginning to shape at the end of the first session on magazine training with Dr. Trench. Instead of the 30-minute magazine training and shaping with Rosie on that first day, magazine training Sniffy took me 21 minutes while shaping Sniffy took me 44 minutes. It was also frustrating that there wasn't a speed-up option for shaping Sniffy (I know that there can't be because the trainers intermittently have to manually reinforce Sniffy, but that was a long 44 minutes to sit through).

Looking back, I think I'm glad that Sniffy took longer to magazine train and shape than Rosie did - the program gave me greater patience going into the first training session with Rosie, so I was pleasantly surprised when it didn't take long at all with Rosie. However, had I known that the live rats would progress so quickly, I would've felt more prepared to move seamlessly into shaping (after she was magazine trained, I was hesitant about how to begin shaping). In this way, I was not prepared to follow one of Pryor's ten laws of shaping, which says that the trainer should always be prepared for the next step of the training process.

Overall, I'd say using Sniffy was a good experience. I also appreciated the bar graphs that charted Sniffy's Bar Sound, Sound Food, and Action Strength. That helped to demystify the shaping process for me and put it in more concrete terms. And I would absolutely suggest continuing to use live rats for future classes - it just isn't the same only seeing the process on a computer screen.

Average number of responses per reinforcement schedule

This graph shows the average number of bar presses that Rosie made during shaping, FR, FI, and extinction. *Note: We did not include the number of responses for FI5, as we accidentally did not record that data.

As we can see from the graph, Rosie consistently pressed the bar during FR, FI, and extinction, almost to equal extents. She had the highest average during FI.

The exact numbers are as follows:

Shaping	62 bar presses
FR	263 bar presses
FI	265 bar presses
Extinction	261 bar presses

Challenges

There were a couple of challenges during training - many probably due more to trainer error than to the fault of Rosie. We had trouble regulating Rosie's weight throughout training. Her initial weight was 180 grams, her target weight was 165 grams, and throughout training she was almost every possible weight in between. A post with the weight chart is to follow, but that difficulty could have affected Rosie's motivation, and thus her performance, on certain days (specifically the days toward the end of September when she was on the higher end of that weight spectrum). Monitoring her performance however, Rosie seemed to perform quite consistently and maintain motivation through the weeks. So perhaps those weight fluctuations didn't throw Rosie off as much as it did Brian and me.
In order to correct/manage this slight problem, we tried to just play it day by day. I think we could have fed her a little less than we did when her weight initially began to climb, but once we noticed that it wasn't stabilizing at any one point, we began to decrease the food that we gave Rosie in an effort to get her weight down a bit. At one point, we were feeding her 4-5 grams per day. We believe that the sugar/chocolate reinforcement pellets made her gain significant amounts of weight, but it was a challenge trying to keep her weight steady around one number.

Another challenge that Brian and I were initially concerned about was the fact that Rosie's box, box 1, did not always deliver a reinforcement when it was supposed to. In watching/studying the mechanism when it turned and when it was supposed to deliver a reinforcement, sometimes the pellets simply did not get picked up by the turning of the mechanism. Thus, reinforcements would be delivered every other time that they were supposed to be. We noticed this happening more and more by the first of October.
While we were concerned about it at first, we realized in watching Rosie's trainings that the malfunctioning reinforcement delivery did not affect her motivation - in fact, we believe that it actually made her more motivated to continue pressing the bar (similar to our class discussion of the role of partial reinforcement schedules in a rat's increased resistance to extinction). I believe that this extreme partial reinforcement schedule (reinforcements being delivered every other time on top of the already implemented partial schedules of FR2, 3, 5, 7, and 10, and FI5, 10, and 15) played a significant role in the consistently high number of responses made by Rosie during extinction.

Extinction day 2

Today was Rosie's last day of extinction! Today, Rosie exhibited many of the same behavior from yesterday's extinction day 1 session. Throughout the session, Rosie exhibited lots of jumping, rearing up all walls of the box, biting the bar and food hopper. Rosie still exhibited frantic/erratic/fast-paced behavior and general movements, but I also noticed that she spent more time than yesterday on other activities (such as grooming). Rosie engaged in the most jumping around the 22-minute mark. The following is a breakdown of the number of times that Rosie pressed the bar, represented in 5-minute intervals:

0-5 minutes = 60 bar presses
5-10 minutes = 31 bar presses
10-15 minutes = 29 bar presses
15-20 minutes = 21 bar presses
20-25 minutes = 55 bar presses
25-30 minutes = 7 bar presses
203 total bar presses

As we can see from this layout, there was a notable resurgence of bar pressing in the 5 minutes between 20 and 25 minutes.

Here is the cumulative record for today's extinction session:

It appears, from the cumulative record, that Rosie was quite resistant to extinction, an observation that her behaviors corroborate.

Extinction day 1

Today Brian and I put Rosie on the first day of extinction. It was hard to watch Rosie get so upset and continually press the bar in hopes of reinforcement. I'm not sure what I was expecting or how other rats behaved, but Rosie was certainly not happy about extinction. Some of the behavior that we noticed:
-more frantic and faster pressing of the bar
-more attempts to press the bar in different ways (pushing from below, pushing with head on the bar)
-biting the bar
-biting the edge of the food hopper
-faster/more erratic general movements around cage
-more jumping in box
-attempting to climb box walls
-climbing wall above the bar (with one foot on the bar) and hanging off of the little light bulb in box
-twisting herself upside down at the food hopper in an attempt to bite where the food usually comes out
-looking up/rearing up at the box's ceiling frequently
-increased sniffing of the floor
-sense of urgency (didn't stop hardly at all in the 30 minutes to groom herself)

Below is a video of Rosie's frantic bar pressing behavior and general erratic movements around the box:

Next is a video of Rosie jumping up in the cage, further evidence of her becoming increasingly frustrated as the session continued:

Below is a picture of the cumulative record for today, which shows a pretty steady response rate that decreases in frequency as the session continued:

The number of bar presses that Rosie did during the 30 minute session is as follows (in 5-minute intervals):
0-5 minutes = 82 bar presses
5-10 minutes = 51 bar presses
10-15 minutes = 81 bar presses
15-20 minutes = 28 bar presses
20-25 minutes = 40 bar presses
25-30 minutes = 36 bar presses
(Total = 318 bar presses)

I'm interested to see how she responds to extinction again tomorrow, since she exhibited such resistance today.