Saturday, October 6, 2012

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment