Lil Thing Magazine Training
Lil Thing is my real live rat that is being magazine trained. It took one day and in 18 minutes and 36 seconds Lil thing was magazine trained. I knew that she was trained because she began pressing the lever and administering her own food consistently, without me having to press the lever.
During this process I noticed that the noise of the pellet hitting the tray and the light associated with the food delivery triggered a response in Lil Thing that she was doing something right. She was very curious during this time and did not seem driven to complete the task rather more curious to figure out what was wanted of her. However, when she started pressing the lever and associating all the noises with the correct behavior that result in food, she looked very driven.
This did illustrate some similarities to what we learned in class about magazine training. The most important thing that I noticed was the timing of the reinforcement. When Sniffy was learning to press the lever I had to be very conscious of where she was in the box and make sure that I was not reinforcing her in the wrong action. Also, the progression of reinforcement is very important. It is easy to reinforce everytime the rat goes in front of the lever but if this is the only action that is reinforced she will never learn to make contact and eventually press the lever. Another comparison to class is that it is much easier to talk about training than actually doing it. So it was frustrating working with Sniffy because it was not perfect every single time. The same goes for training Lil Thing, some days are great and some days she just does not want to work at all.
During this process I noticed that the noise of the pellet hitting the tray and the light associated with the food delivery triggered a response in Lil Thing that she was doing something right. She was very curious during this time and did not seem driven to complete the task rather more curious to figure out what was wanted of her. However, when she started pressing the lever and associating all the noises with the correct behavior that result in food, she looked very driven.
This did illustrate some similarities to what we learned in class about magazine training. The most important thing that I noticed was the timing of the reinforcement. When Sniffy was learning to press the lever I had to be very conscious of where she was in the box and make sure that I was not reinforcing her in the wrong action. Also, the progression of reinforcement is very important. It is easy to reinforce everytime the rat goes in front of the lever but if this is the only action that is reinforced she will never learn to make contact and eventually press the lever. Another comparison to class is that it is much easier to talk about training than actually doing it. So it was frustrating working with Sniffy because it was not perfect every single time. The same goes for training Lil Thing, some days are great and some days she just does not want to work at all.
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