All done with the Operant Boxes..

Well Jubilee is all done with this project. I have definitely bonded with her, she would come sit on my lap or walk around on the desk after training while I was doing work! She has calmed down so much since the first day and when I walk up to her cage she comes to the front, so she definitely recognizes me.

I enjoyed getting to see the skinner box at work. I have read so much about the theories of learning so when I came to BSC and heard about this class I couldn't wait to get in it. It was fun to put all that stored up info to use and set it in stone just a little more.

In a couple weeks we start the next project! Im not sure what I will be doing, but I think I am going to work with Jubilee again. I am so not strong enough to go to the Humane Society.. I would be adopting every dog I see. If I was closer to home I could possibly find a way to train my dog Zeus to do something awesome since he is so pathetic.. I like the whole training to get a beer thing.

My dog.. quite pathetic. Doesn't really live up to his namesake.

Most likely Ill train Jubilee to jump hurdles or do the obstacle course!

Jubilee says Bye!!

How were Sniffy and Jubilee different?

At the very beginning of this semester, we started training with a computer program called Sniffy. In a couple previous posts I compared and contrasted Sniffy to Jubes, but here is a summary.


Magazine Training-
I tried to be pretty consistent with rewarding Jubilee the same way I rewarded Sniffy, but I tended to be a little strict and I became a little more nervous that I wasn't doing it right with Jubes. I was a little more hesitant with her. I mean you can start a new file with Sniffy, and you can't really press "new file" with a live rat.


Shaping -
With Jubilee this took a couple more sessions than with Sniffy, she learned a little slower than the virtual rat. It only took about an hour to shape Sniffy, which I guess would be two training sessions with Jubilee. Sniffy the virtual rat caught on much faster to the area, the wall, the lever, and then the action of pressing the lever than Jubes did.

 I loved having the Sniffy software as a resource. It gave me practice at magazine training and shaping before actually doing the real thing which made me much more confident going into training Jubes. I learned that all rats are different, and even a computer software can never predict how an animal will respond and what exactly it will take, I mean they are animals! I would definately recommend using both the software and the live rat in future classes because it just gives you that extra push and a little experience that I wouldn't have had. I never had experience with training an animal this way, and even though I have been taking psychology for 6 years now an have been learning about "Learning" having both resources gave me that extra edge and understanding.

How did her behavior change?

Here are a couple graphs showing Jubilee's response curve.

Figure 1. This graph shows the average number of bar presses for each Fixed Ratio schedule. The number of responses increases as the amount of work it takes to get a reinforcement increases.

Figure 2. This graph shows the average amount of reinforcements received during each of the Fixed Ratio schedules. As the amount of lever presses required to receive a sugar pellet increases, the total amount received per training session decreases.

Extinction.

The last two days out of the total 15 days of training were dedicated to extinction, which means that we untrained the previously learned behavior. So Jubilee goes in the box and presses the lever, no matter how many times, and never receives a sugar pellet.

This is kind of entertaining to watch, as the rats get pretty darn frustrated. She would push it 5 times, then look in the hopper, press it a few more times then look, press it a WHOLE lot and look again. She started chewing on the lever, looking underneath it, tried to climb on it, and then went and took her anger out on the hopper.

This first video Jubilee a couple minutes into the first day of extinction..

We recorded the amount of bar presses for every 5 minutes during the extinction sessions.
1st day of extinction 
5 minutes-100 presses
10 minutes - 146 presses
15 minutes- 194 presses
20 minutes- 218 presses
25 minutes- 221 presses

2nd day of extinction
5 minutes- 51
10 minutes- 103
15 minutes- 127
20 minutes- 127
25 minutes- 127

Obviously on the last day she gave up and did not press the bar at all for 10 minutes. There was a small extinction burst on the first day at about the 3rd minute, but I feel this would have been larger if we would have been able to move up another schedule.

I also thought that since we spent 4 days on FR10 that extinction would have been a little more active.

And this video shows Jubilee getting a little frustrated a little into extinction on the 1st day.

Weight and food grams by day

This is a chart if Jubilee's daily weight and amount fed. We originally deprived the rats  to 80% of their original weight before starting training and two days before beginning training we fed the rats with a mixture of rat chow and sugar pellets. This is to ensure motivation (hunger) during training. Jubilee's target weight was 201 grams.
The first bold day was magazine training. The rest of the bold dates note training days and the last two are the two days of extinction.

DATE	WEIGHT	FOOD
9/12/12	228g	2.9g
9/13/12	216g	3.5g
9/14/12	212g	3.9g
9/15/12	205g	4.3g
9/16/12	204g	4.1g
9/17/12	199g	5.5g
9/18/12	200g	6.4g
9/19/12	199g	6.8g
9/20/12	194g	16.7g
9/21/12	207g	10g
9/22/12	204g	9.3g
9/23/12	208g	7.4g
9/24/12	213g	5.5g
9/25/12	205g	5.7g
9/26/12	211g	4.5g
9/27/12	206g	4.7g
9/28/12	201g	5.2g
9/29/12	200g	6.2g
9/30/12	194g	9.1g
10/1/12	200g	5.5g
10/2/12	198g	5.8g
10/3/12	199g	6.0g
10/4/12	199g	6.5g
10/5/12	198g	6.7g
10/6/12	200g	Free Feed

Final Days of Schedule Training

For training days 11-13 we remained on a Fixed Ratio Schedule of 10.

I let the full time run on each of these since she was not achieving the minimum. On Day 11 she pressed the bar 368 times in 30 minutes and Day 12 480 times in 30 minutes. Both of theses were getting closer... but not quite at the 50 reward minimum. On the final day of training, Day 13, she pressed the bar 662 times!

Finally, she achieved the minimum.. but the next day we had to start extinction. Bummer, I really wanted to try another schedule with her. I think she really would have done well on a VR schedule!

Working with live animals.. not so smooth..

During training I definitely ran into a couple problems with Jubilee over the course of our training. 

Only one of the problems had to do with the equipment, on the second day of training the hopper kept jamming, so when she pushed the lever, she would not receive immediate reward. After about the 3rd time it jammed I played around with it and figured out I could turn the knob at the top of the hopper to release the food. It only ended up getting stuck one more time so when it did I immediately turned it to administer the food. I do not think this had a major impact on training since it only occurred a few times.

I did not really experience many other problems with Jubilee. She has a very high behavior rate, but is constantly attracted to the front corner of the box, around where I sit. This among other things calls for high distraction but she does not seem to be bothered by other noises in the room or people walking around during training.
The obsession with a particular part of the floor started on the first day of training, and to solve this I tried wiping down and cleaning out the floor of the box, thinking maybe it was another rat's scent that was enthralling her with this area. I did this every day before training, and it did not help whatsoever. I guess she just really likes to nibble on that area!

One thing that I also thought would be a problem was the way she was starting to press the lever. She presses it in every way possible except the normal way. She shoves her nose in there, sometimes nibbles it.. and even sometimes turns her head upside down and gets it to press.  I thought this would be an issue but it ended up not being a problem. I discussed it with Dr. Trench and she said she may have developed a "chaining" of behaviors on her own.

The final thing that may have potentially decreased Jubilee's learning was a sparratic training schedule. My day is hectic and with volleyball practices and tournaments her time to train was not always the same. It was actually more regulated towards the end, then at the beginning. During the first 6 days of training I had to take 2 days off in a row and some of her training sessions were much later than the day before.

Her weight has also been all over the place from day to day. I do not know if this is a potential problem but it is just something I have observed.

Schedules of Reinforcement

After Jubilee successfully achieved the FR schedule, I began to slowly stretch the ratio, and move on to higher FR schedules.

DAY 6
I moved her schedule up to an FR2 and observed her actions for 27:38. In this time period she pressed the lever 201 times!

DAY 7-10
Jubilee continued to do well at each of the different schedules until we reached FR10.
FR3- 26:08 309 lever presses= 103 reinforcements
FR5- 25:40 344 lever presses= 68 reinforcements
FR7- 26:20 356 lever presses= 50 reinforcements
FR10-  30:00 281 lever presses= 28 reinforcements

Since she did not achieve the minimum of 50 on the FR10, we will continue with another day on FR10 until she achieves this minimum.

One thing I did notice was the Post-Reinforcement pause got substantially larger when we moved up to FR10. She would take very large breaks in between pressing the lever causing time to run out and a significantly decreased amount of responses.

Shaping Cont...

DAY 4
Today I hoped would be the final day spent on FR1/initial shaping. During the time period of 25:13 she pressed the bar 114 times while I administered 5 by myself to get her going at the beginning. She did achieve over 50 reinforcements by herself but only because I got her started.

DAY 5
I decided to go one more day on the FR1 since during the last training session I had to administer some rewards, this time I wanted her to do them all by herself. After 27:50 she pressed the bar 151 times by herself. For the next training day I will be moving her up to the next schedule since she achieved the minimum of 50!

Heres a pic of Jubes getting her reward!!

Shaping Jubilee!

The goal was now to shape Jubilee further to press the bar in order to receive food

DAY 2
Today I trained for 28:43 and she slowly started to catch on. In the time period she pressed the level 5 times while I rewarded her 75 times. Jubilee frequently put her paws on the level but did not push down hard enough to trigger a reward. She would put her paws up on the bar and just stand there looking for a reward, so I eventually had to stop rewarding the behavior of just putting her paws on it and force her to become a little frustrated and express more behavior. She eventually started pushing harder but not enough to associate it with the reward. These actions of putting her paws on the lever or going to that area and then looking for food in the hopper proved to me that she was magazine trained and her behavior was being shaped.

DAY 3
I continued with training Jubilee on the FR 1 schedule. I trained for about 27 minutes and I administered 58 rewards while she pressed the bar 14 times on her own. She has quite an unconventional way of pressing the lever though, the likes to shove her nose to the back and push with her whole head and face. She will do this every time she goes to push the bar instead of finding a way to push with her paws. Sometimes she will try to chew and nibble on the bar before she pushes it, but eventually she will stick her nose and face on the bar and push it down to get food. Hopefully she is not going to become conditioned to a behavior chain where she nibbles and then push it down. If this does occur I will have to find a way to extinct this behavior.

Magazine Training

The goal was to magazine train Jubilee to the sounds and actions that cause the release of food from the hopper.

Previous to magazine training we deprived Jubilee to 85% percent of their original weight and two days before the first training session we introduced sugar pellets into their diet. Both of these steps were taken in order to insure motivation and that the reward would be familiar and recognized as normal food.

DAY 1 
The first day we (Dr. Trench and I) sat and slowly magazine trained Jubilee so that every time she went near the particular corner or the lever, i manually pushed the button and a reward released. We magazine trained for about 22 minutes and during that time I pressed the lever 40 times and she did not self reward at all.

She seemed to be very interested in the parts of the cage and in particular one corner of the floor. She spent a lot of time focused in and biting on the metal wires of the floor. This is what prevented from more continuous shaping although she was giving a decent amount of other behavior.

Training Sniffy, The virtual rat

The goal of this task was to become prepared to train our live rat by first training a rat on a computer software called "Sniffy".  The first step was to magazine train sniffy, or classically condition the rat to the sound and the appearance of food. This prepared Sniffy to be shaped to press the bar and eventually put him on a training schedule.

Here is Sniffy, the computer program!

After Sniffy developed an association between the sound of the bar and the dispensing of food, I then began shaping Sniffy. This consisted of gradually reinforcing behaviors that resembled bar pressing, and eventually only rewarding for rearing up at the back wall by the dispenser. Soon enough, Sniffy started rearing more often right at the bar and would sometimes accidentally press the bar. For each time after that, the only time Sniffy received reinforcement was after a bar press. Sniffy soon caught on and would press the bar multiple times in a row.

When Sniffy was shaped, I switched him to a Variable Ratio schedule of 5. This means that sniffy only received reinforcement after a certain measured amount of behavior, such as a varied ratio of 5 bar presses. After I put the rat on the schedule, I noticed that the bar pressing was much more rapid and almost aggressive.

I then continued with extinction, or making sniffy forget the training. This means that the rat received no reinforcement at all after a bar press. He showed a very rapid extinction burst, he would press the bar very rapidly trying to get to food, up to 200 presses per minute. This lasted for about 5 minutes. Eventually, the training became extinct and sniffy no longer pressed the bar more than he did previous to the training.

I started and finished all of this training within 3 hours! I used the computer programs setting where you can "speed up time" to increase shaping behaviors, instead of waiting in real time.

After using this program I feel much more confident in training my live rat. I will probably practice with the program a few more times to gain some more confidence, and get more used to proper shaping techniques, but I feel I am ready to go live!

My first training day is today with my live rat, whose name I decided is Jubilee (Jubes), just because! (I really needed a name, so I decided to go with the most entertaining one.)

First Lab!

First off, I was so excited to start this class and get to meet my rat. Like most people, I cannot stand rats if they're in my house, but I couldn't wait to start working with these ones! Its nice to finally have a lab where we get to work with live animals, and keep them alive.. I am definitely tired of all the fetal pigs, turtles, and frogs from biology labs.
 Initially, I was a little nervous to start holding them just because I was afraid I was going to drop my rat, but mine ended up being pretty calm to start off with. She is super curious and is constantly sniffing everything, so I am still a little afraid I might drop her because she likes to crawl up me!

Here she is!

And again.. trying to crawl up me..

As I went into the lab today I found that Devons rats had pulled a lab coat almost all the way into their cage and decided to have a snack. Hopefully it wont hurt them too much, but I definitely learned that even though they are lab bred rats, they are still rats and will chew anything.

I am still super excited to start working with them and I have been trying to think of a name since last week. Here are my options..

Matilda
Boots

Suzie (thanks Alex)

Jubes, short for Jubilee

This last one is an inside joke with my volleyball team. This past weekend we played a girl named Jubilee Haase, and made up the loving nickname of Jubes.. Of course I still can't decide on a name.. HELP!