Ring, Ring!!

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Lilly has really learned how to ring the bell and does it constantly.  The training sessions go very quickly because she rings it over and over again without stopping except to quickly eat the pellet of food.  My partners and I are all ensuring that our rats have the bell-ringing down before we present the odors.  We are beginning to write our revised methods section, so stay tuned!

 Also, Kim put a video on her blog of Lilly ringing her bell because I forgot my camera on the day of filming (thank you, Kim).  Check it out at …

http://kmill2.wordpress.com/

So Far, So Good…

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In today’s training, I put the bell in for Lilly to ring and then reinforced her when she touched the bell with her nose.  She did a great job and hit the bell with her nose at least 20-30 times and then ran to the appropriate corner for food after I clicked.  The only problem is that the bell does not make a very nice ringing sound when she taps it.  Right now, the bell is hanging on a ribbon, so we are going to change it and hang the bell on a thinner piece of string which hopefully will not weigh the bell down as much and will allow for a ringing sound when Lilly hits it with her nose.  Lilly is habituating to the new environment nicely which allows her to perform the bell ringing behavior more constantly, rather than spending times exploring the new environment. 

And so it begins …

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Yesterday, we spent time letting each rat explore the experimental apparatus.  We hope they will habituate to the new environment before we begin the trials for the experiment.  Today, I worked with Lilly on clicker training to come to the appropriate corner for food in the new experimental apparatus (i.e. to the front left corner in the Tupperware container).  By the end of our session, when I clicked the clicker she would occasionally come to the correct corner.  It seems to be a faster process this time than when I first clicker trained her in the aquarium. 

 Good luck on your experiments, everyone! 

Experiment Idea

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Now that we have successfully taught our rats to associate the clicker with food and have trained our rats to do amazing tricks, our next task is to do an experiment to test something that we have become curious about over the last few weeks.  My teammates and my research question is:  “How does odor affect a rat’s performance?”  We also hope to determine what smells are aversive to rats. 

Our idea for this experiment came out of Maria’s experience with her rat not performing her trick after Maria had petted a cat before coming to train her rat.  We have also learned that rats have a keen sense of smell, so we are interested in this sense. 

To answer our research question, we are going to teach our rats how to do a new trick that they can repeat over and over.  We will train them to ring a bell and then they will be rewarded with food.  Once we have established a baseline number of times the rat rings the bell in a period of one minute, we will present different odors to the rat.  With each new odor, we will note the number of rings that occur in a one minute period and compare it to the baseline number of rings with no odor presented.  

Good luck with your experiments! 

Great Job, Lilly!

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Lilly’s training went great today.  When getting onto the platform, she stood on her hind legs about 90% of the time.  She only got onto the platform without standing on her hind legs one or two times during our session today and during these trials, she was not reinforced.  This is a step up from yesterday’s session when she did not consistenly stand on her hind legs on the platform.  Today, we did about 30 trials and as soon as she would finish her morsel of food, she would run back to the platform, climb on, and stand up again.  Great job, Lilly!

Also, her weight has remained steady between 205 and 210 grams during the past two weeks.  I feed her roughly 17 grams of food each day. 

More Progress on Lilly’s Trick

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The terminal behavior I hoped Lilly would perform was to stand on the platform on her hind legs.  Once she learned to get on the platform, I was at a loss on how to train her to stand on her hind legs because it is not a behavior she would do enough by chance for me to reinforce by the click.  I was also scared that if I only clicked when she was on her hind legs on the platform that it would not be enough clicking and that the behavior of just going on the platform would also be extinguished.  After a lot of hard work and lots of time spent thinking about how to train her, I began waving my hand over her once she was on the platform in order to get her to stand on her hind legs and would then click.  Once I did this enough, I no longer used my hand to encourage her to stand and would only click if she stood on her hind legs on the platform.  So here we have it … Lilly stands on the platform on her hind legs without any prompting from me!  (I am, however, going to continue to work with her on standing up more straight and for longer periods of time on the platform.) 

Also, sorry there is a few seconds of Lilly doing nothing on the video … I still don’t know how to cut and edit my videos.  For some reason, I can’t open the video in Windows Movie Maker.  I’m still learning all this new technology. 

Lilly Joined the Circus!

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I have posted the video of Lilly performing her trick.  As you will see, I have not yet trained her to stand on her hind legs once she is on the platform.  I don’t know how to reinforce this behavior of standing on her hind legs on the platform because she has only done it a few times.  We did work a lot, however, on not just jumping on the platform and immediately running off of it.  She stays on it for a brief few seconds.  Enjoy the video!

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