Sniffy Vs. Lil Thing

Sniffy shaping took 40 minutes to complete and live rat shaping took 48 minutes and 36 seconds. Training sniffy was not as interesting or easy as training Lil Thing. The way the box is set up in Sniffy is a direct frontal view of the box and so the trainer has to guess where the rats head is rough in relation to the lever.

In real training I had a much better view of the box and could see Lil Thing's hands and nose in relation to the lever perfectly. I felt as though it made it much easier to shape her behavior. 

The mannerisms of Sniffy were a little more exaggerated than that of a real rat. Sniffy took many more breaks than that of Lil Thing. I learned to have patience while training Sniffy. 

Also, Sniffy training went all in one day from beginning to end. Whereas real rat training takes weeks. 

The strength of Sniffy was that people get the basic understanding of operant box training and have some expectation of what real life operant box training will be like. The strength of real operant box training is to see how well animals respond to primary reinforcers. Especially when they are deprived of the primary reinforcer. 

From a learning standpoint, I learned that the more consistent the trainer is with training the more successful the sessions will be. Sniffy did not have a chance to exhibit the challenge of inconsistency in training. That is what I learned during training a real rat opposed to Sniffy. However, Sniffy was beneficial in giving the trainer a general idea of what training a real rat would be like. 

In future classes I think that students could go without using Sniffy. I think that maybe a tutorial video could suffice on the virtual training. The biggest learning point I gained from virtual training was the cumulative record understanding. But then our class did not have a cumulative record in our live rat training so it really did not matter that I learned that in Sniffy. I also think that real life experience with the animal is much more beneficial than a computer simulation.