Magazine training Rosie

Today, Brian and I started training Rosie with the help of Dr. Trench. We were magazine training today, and I got to control the reinforcements during this training session.

Rosie was very timid for much of the session, especially at the beginning. She wandered around the box, sniffing, rearing up, grooming herself, and exploring her surroundings for a good 10 minutes, all without eating any sugar pellets. I had delivered two sugar pellets into the hopper when she first entered the box, and then another three as she wandered around the box/came near the hopper. Interestingly, Rosie stuck her head into the hopper multiple times during those first 10 minutes without eating any of the pellets. Though she had eaten the pellets the two days previous to training, perhaps she was unsure of them in this new place. Rosie also burrowed her nose between the bars of the floor many times, perhaps in response to the smell of the rat that was trained in that box before her.

Finally, Rosie began to eat the pellets. After that, I began reinforcing whenever she neared the hopper, which she seemed to do quite often after her initial tasting of the pellets. She seemed to learn quickly that the hopper was where food came from: Though it took her a while to approach the hopper again after she had wandered away from it, she eagerly ate the food presented in the hopper immediately after she had finished eating the previous pellet. Once she grasped the concept more and more, she started sticking her head farther into the hopper, biting the area around the opening, and twisting her body/head in an attempt to get to where she thought the source of the food was (up at the top of the hopper).

The entire magazine training session today lasted 20 minutes. Rosie received food by pressing the bar herself 3 times, and I manually reinforced Rosie for approaching the hopper 32 times. Dr. Trench told Brian and me that the number was a little low (we're aiming for 40-60 times per session), so I shouldn't have been as strict with my criteria for determining reinforceable behavior. One thing that threw me off during training was how quickly we seemed to move from magazine training to shaping. Probably near the 15 minute mark, Dr. Trench told me to start reinforcing anytime she turned to the left, which I didn't understand at first; eventually I realized that she wanted me to reinforce anytime Rosie looked toward/approached the bar. I wasn't expecting to move from magazine training to shaping in the same day. I guess since shaping is a process, it's beneficial to weave it into the first lesson, but I hope that Rosie has properly learned that food comes from the hopper and has associated its sound with food! Perhaps because we moved what I thought was relatively fast through magazine training, it seemed to take less time than I had expected it to and less time than the book led me to believe it would.