There was one little problem!

The only challenge that Carolyn and I faced during training was on the second day when we had to move boxes. We moved from box 1 to box 4 because there was another group using our box that day. Shirley's behavior regressed that day and shaping did not get very far. Shirley only pressed the bar 3 times where as the previous day she pressed it 21 times. Looking back, we know that box 4 is the box that had been clogging and not rewarding the rats like it was supposed to. Therefore the problem was probably not that we had to switch boxes but that this specific box was malfunctioning. We overcame this problem by making sure that we were always training in box one in case the new environment had that much of an effect on Shirley. We did not want to be set back any more and the best way to make sure of that was to always have the same box. I am not sure that we could have done anything differently that would have fixed this problem. We did not know at the time that the magazine was getting clogged, it sounded like the rewards were being delivered and that everything was functioning correctly. I think training could have been improved by training at the same time every single day. A few days there were conflicts in mine and Carolyn's schedule and we would be forced to train at a different time than 2:30. On these days Shirley would sometimes perform the behavior less or display some strange behaviors. However, I do not think that this had an overall negative effect on training  as Shirley still progressed very quickly and worked very hard throughout the entire process.