Sniffy Training

Training sniffy was definitely interesting. The graphs depicting Sniffy's associations with the sound and food, the bar sound, and the action strength of the desired behavior was extremely helpful in learning the steps for training and for grasping the notion of how training and learning occurs. One thing that I found frustrating, to say the least, was the required level of each bar before moving on to the next step. Although I can understand the principles behind why the programmers would have it that way (to truly mash it into our brains), it nevertheless was frustrating.

That being said, magazine training took much longer than I anticipated (nearly three quarters of an hour). Although it seemed like Sniffy had clearly built an association between the magazine and reinforcement, the program refused to believe it saying something along the lines of, "you're nearly there. Keep going and Sniffy will have a strong association so you can move on."Other than the time it took to magazine train Sniffy, the process was simple, and I was quite pleased by her progress (my own little reinforcement).

When it came to shaping, I was again shocked -- this time for the opposite reason. It took Sniffy only a few minutes before she was pressing the bar. The difference in times it took for magazine training to be completed and before her first bar press was striking and truly stunning. All I simply did was reinforce Sniffy when she was near the wall with the bar. I also reinforced her when she reared in the air, regardless of where she was in the box. Soon enough she was rearing only on the wall with the bar after I was more exclusive in my rewarding. After she pressed the bar a few times, she caught on extremely quickly, and from there on out, I only reinforced her when she pressed the bar. The ease of shaping and the speed at which she began pressing the bar gave me the false belief that Rat would be equally as easy.

Moving from CR (FR1) to FR2 was simple with almost no lag. I quickly went to FR3, FR5, FR10, etc. at an extremely fast rate of progress. Within a day or two (while also experimenting with different VRs), I had Sniffy doing an FR50. It quickly became like a game to me, seeing how I could manipulate Sniffy's behavior.

Although I did use the book as a guide, I took a much more organic approach to Sniffy. I would raise the frequency necessary to achieve a reward; I would change from FR to VR back to FR to FI to VI and repeat the process just to see how each schedule would effect behavior and how the cumulative record would reflect that. I ended up extincting Sniffy multiple times just for fun, only to bring her back to ratio schedules in the 40s or 50s.

Sniffy was not only a fun experience, but it was an extremely useful and interactive tool. I was able to get a grasp on how operant conditioning works and how different schedules at different rates (of time and ratio) influenced behavior. I am very glad that I worked with Sniffy as much as I did before training Rat.