Obstacles

Although Rat was extremely compliant and very easy to work with, there were still some obstacles. Probably the biggest had to do with extinction. During training, Rat was doing so well that I decided to continue training for an extra two days. This in itself made it more difficult to extinct her in the recommended two days. An additional confound was the fact that I was "jackpotting" her by doubling or even tripling her reinforcement for a job well done. This increased the probability that she would perform the action (i.e., pressing the bar) more consistently and more completely, in that I would only jackpot her when she pressed the bar an exceptional amount of times in a row. Unfortunately, this made extinction even harder.

The compounding effects of an additional two training days and jackpotting good behavior during the last few days of training made extinction even harder (not only for Rat but also me to watch her hard work be destroyed). Her first day of extinction proved to be largely ineffective, as the rate at which she pressed the bar barely decreased. The second day's results provided similar results, although she definitely was not pressing the bar quite as much. It still was not satisfactory in my eyes; she still was associating the bar with reinforcement, and that association was still very strong. In order to overcome these obstacles, I had to add a third extinction day. All in all, extinction was a hard process to watch; Rat worked so hard and very quickly learned what she needed to. Having all of that work nullified was simply a shame.