Shaping Peaches (day 1)

Our Goal:
To shape Peaches to press the lever in the Operant box in order to receive a pellet of food.

Shaping is a training procedure in which the rat is provided a reinforcement of successive approximations of a desired behavior.  Shaping makes it possible to establish a behavior in a few minutes that rarely or never occur spontaneously.

Procedure:
The shaping session started at 8:50 A.M and lasted 30 minutes.  On day 1 of shaping, I was the trainer and Megan was the observer.  The purpose of our training session was the reinforce the magazine training done the day before, to reinforce Peaches moving her head to the left, turing left of the hopper, moving in front of the lever and putting her paw on the lever.  Peaches weighted 213.6 grams, 1.6 grams above her target weight.

Results:
Peaches seemed to move to hopper during the reinforcement of magazine training and easily caught on to moving her head to the left.  But for some reason she wanted to put her head on the lever rather than her paw.  Even with her head on the lever she didn't push down on in, she would turn her body and bite the lever down in order to get food.  This caused us to regress our training to having her get back in the corner of the opposite side of the box and press the hand switch to see if she would come due the hopper due to the sound.  Once she was in front of the hopper she would move back to the lever, turning her body to bite and press the lever which worked several times in a row.  Through out the session she was reinforced 39 times and pressed/bit the lever 6 times.

Beginning of Shaping Peaches

Cumulative Record of Shaping (Day 1)

Discussion:
The results of putting her head on the lever and turning her body to bite the lever could possibly to due to the little number of reinforcements provided.  Peaches seemed to have developed a significant sound-food association, but her bar sound association and her action strength didn't seem to have developed as quickly.  She knew the area of the box she needed to be in in order to get food, but she didn't seem to understand the concept of pressing down on the lever to get food.  She found another way to get the lever to move...bite it.  We are going to have to take a couple steps back on Shaping Day 2 and try to significantly reinforce Peaches putting her paws on the lever to get food instead of biting the it.