Captians Log Report Entry 001: Practicing with Sniffy

Practicing with Sniffy

Sniffy is a virtual rat that we used so that we could learn the processes required to train a rat. The program allowed us to experiment with train a virtual rat so that when we got to our actual rat we would be more comfortable and a little bit less nervous. While training Sniffy I got a better sense of the initial process of shaping and then learned that once the rat learns the basic steps of hitting the lever it then becomes a waiting process to see if it has learned how to get food. The next thing Sniffy was used for was to give us a chance to see what a schedule of reinforcement looks like and also what extinction looks like. The process that I used on sniffy was to start magazine training, then move into shaping and once Sniffy learned shaping I put it on a variable ratio 3, the final stage was to put Sniffy into extinction. This entire process took about thirty minutes which is not bad when compared to the amount of time needed to train our actual rat. Sniffy seems to learn exceptionally fast and the real rat doesn't have the option of speeding up time either so overall training sniffy was meant to get us comfortable working with the rats. In magazine training I had to get sniffy associated with the sound of the found hitting the hopper. This did not take long about 15 minutes total and the she was associated with the sound. Next I went into shaping, shaping also took about 15 minutes but was a little bit harder than magazine training because I had to make sure not to miss the action I was looking for. I believe shaping the virtual rat will be easier than the actual rat because it seems that sniffy has a limited amount of behaviors. After shaping I put Sniffy on variable ratio 3. In this ratio I did not see to much of a change in Sniffy's behavior and the responses seemed to stay pretty much the same and stayed on a fairly diagonal line.  Below is a graph that shows the amount of food and lever presses that occurred during different phases of training. 

Picture of Sniffy

Chart of Magazine training, shaping and variable ratio

Chart of Extinction