Captains Log Final Entry: Mission Complete

Working with Captain Kirk and my partner was an experience I will never forget. The opportunity to put into action what I learned in class was invaluable. There are still a few schedules I wish we could have gotten to but in the end it was a mission complete. We struggled at times through the process but we accomplished so much in the end by working through each problem and at times even asking for help. I loved the entire experience and feel that there is not a single thing I would change about it. I was really surprised though at how much I have learned to like my rat friend. She may be a spaz but she is definitely fun to work with. At first I thought it would be easy but through trial and error I learned that training is not an easy thing but if you stick with it you will accomplish what you are after.

Captain Kirk is now on Free feed and enjoying as much food as she can eat. I weighed her the other day just for fun and she has already gained 20 grams.

Also Captain Kirk now gets to enjoy the occasional treat. (Yes that is a Fruit Loop)

Captains Log Report Entry 006: Comparing Sniffy to Captain Kirk

When comparing Sniffy to Captain Kirk we have to realize that Sniffy is a computer program and Captain Kirk is a real rat with hundreds of different actions.

During the shaping process it only took about 15 minutes to train Sniffy while it took eight days to train Captain Kirk. This was kind of discouraging to our team because we felt that we should have gone in and completely shaped our rat in one day.

In our magazine training of Sniffy it was easy because you could see when Sniffy had associated a food pellet with food and when she did not. When we were Magazine training Captain Kirk we were never really sure if we had accomplished our goal or not. Sometimes even when we were shaping we were not sure if we had done it right or not.

With Sniffy we were able to get him over to the corner pretty easy and get him to rear easily but when it came to our rat the behaviors were so sporadic at times that we would constantly have to back up and then move forward a little.

I think working with Sniffy allowed me get my feet wet before training Captain Kirk. Getting my feet wet was good because I was so nervous I was going to mess up. After using Sniffy I was less scared and had a better idea of what was coming at me. Overall even though Sniffy sort of set me up for some disappointment I feel that it was a useful tool in getting me ready to train my own rat because of this I believe Sniffy should be used in the future.

An example of FR 2 cumulative record

Captains Log Day 0018 and 0019: Extinction Days 1 and 2

The last part of our project was to extinguish the behavior that we had just taught. When we say extinguish the behavior basically we are talking about when we put our rat back in the box but no matter what she does she does not get a reward. Once we put Captain Kirk in the box she immediately went over to the lever and started pressing it. After a while she gave up. In the graphs below you can see how on day one the behavior was almost extinguished but on day two we had a slight recovery then it dropped out even faster. By the end of our second extinction day Captain Kirk was no longer pressing the lever. During the extinction process we saw some weird behaviors. She would hang on to the walls and lights and then stand up and sniff the air. Every so often she would go over and try to force food out of the hopper. By the end of the second day though she just sat in the corner sniffing and grooming herself.

Below are two graphs. The first graph is day one extinction and the second one is day two extinction. 

Captain's Log Report Entry 005: Weight Chart

Below is Captain Kirk's Weight chart for the entire time since we started his food deprivation diet. His target weight has been 217 grams so that is why you see the amount of food go up and down because we were trying to keep her around her target weight.

Captains Log Report Entry 004: Average Number of Responses for different Schedules

Below is a graph of the average number of responses for each schedule or reinforcement that we used. The shaping schedule is split in half because the numbers from the first set of days are so much lower that they drew the last set of days down into the tens. We also chose to include the extinction days.

Captains Log Report Entry 003: Problems with Training

In our training sessions we encountered one major problem that affected our entire training time. Captain Kirk was easily distracted which meant that for us to get anything accomplished we would have to be extremely still and also no one could be in the room with us. That was a problem at times because there were always people coming and going and each time our rat would get distracted. In the end we realized that we had to do something so we talked to Dr. Trench about the issue. She suggested that we do two things. First we needed to put up the shield. Secondly we needed to try to clean the cage each time before we put her in. Once we started doing these two things we saw a drastic increase in Captain Kirk's amount of responses. We feel that if we had used the shield from day one that we would have been able to complete more Fixed Ratio Schedules. We are glad though that we asked for help when we did because it allowed us to at least accomplish 5 schedules.

Below is a picture of the shield that we used to keep Captain Kirk from getting distracted.

Captains Log Report Entry 002: Fixed Ratio Schedules

During the different Fixed ratio schedules our rat struggled at times moving through them. As can be seen from the different posts we at times had to back up little and hold on a certain schedule because Captain Kirk was not ready to continue on. In the end we made it through five different Fixed Ratio schedules. We had hoped to get a few more done but our training time ran out. We are happy though with the progress we made when working on the Fixed Ratio Schedules.