Sniffy the Virtual Rat

Sniffy is a virtual rat that we are supposed to magazine train and shape to bar press before we start training our live rat, Shirley. Magazine training Sniffy did not take as long as I thought it would and made things a lot clearer in my mind about what magazine training our live rat would actually look like.  Magazine training sniffy was very easy and took only about fifteen or twenty minutes to get him to associate the sound of the bar with receiving the pellets. Shaping Sniffy to press the bar was more difficult and took longer than it did to magazine train him. Sniffy progressed fairly quickly at first during shaping. He learned to rear and repeated that action many times and seemed to pick up the fact that he needed to press the lever to receive food fairly easily. It was not until the action bar on the graph and the sound association bar reached over a quarter of the way that it became frustrating. Sniffy seemed to have bar pressing understood (pushing the bar in rapid succession 8- 10 times) according to the book. However, it took him a while to actually push past the last step and reach the max. Every time Sniffy would rear back and not press the bar his bars on the graph would decrease slightly. However, his rearing back occasionally did not seem unnatural or due to the fact that he was not trained fully like the program was telling me. It took a good amount of time (probably closer to 45 minutes or and hour) to actually get Sniffy to the maximum potential on the bar graph so that the program determined him fully trained.

After training Sniffy, I do feel more prepared now to train Shirley. I think that training Sniffy virtually gave me a more concrete understanding of what was actually going to be happening in the box. When just discussing the process in class it I had an unclear picture and imagined it being much more complicated than it actually is. I found the Sniffy very helpful for me considering I am a visual learner and having examples I can see and practice with help me understand better and achieve my goals better as well.

I put Sniffy on a Fixed interval schedule (FI-10) after shaping him. Sniffy seemed to get somewhat frustrated at first when the pellet would not be given to him when he pressed the bar. When he did not get a pellet but wanted one he would press the bar rapidly and ferociously a few times before giving up.  Before, during shaping, Sniffy would press the bar in succession but not with so much aggression towards the lever. After a few minutes he figured out that if he waited long enough he would eventually receive a pellet.

Sniffy On FI-10

Bar Press Graph