Magazine Training

The goal of our first training session was to magazine train Lil' Sebastian.  Magazine training is conditioning the rat to form an association between the sound or light of the hopper with the presentation of food.  This teaches Lil' Sebastian to eat a sugar pellet when the button is pressed to reward her behavior. In order to do this, Madeline taught Chloe and I how to boot up the reinforcement program, and we loaded the "manual" setting so every time we pressed the button, a pellet was presented to the hopper.

In order to do this, Lil' Sebastian was first allowed to explore the operant box for a few minutes, then Chloe presented a pellet in the hopper for her to eat.  Another pellet was not presented until she ate the previous one and then turned away. Lil' Sebastian was very disinterested in the sugar pellets at first and there would be moderately long periods of time between eating each pellet.  She spent a lot of her time biting the the floor of the cage, and was particularly interested in the front left corner.  It looked like she would attempt to dig in that area a lot.  At first we thought the chips needed to be replaced, but this behavior eventually dwindled out.

Eventually LIl' Sebastian started to become more interested in the food.  After about 10 minutes, she started eating more frequently, still presenting food after she ate the previous pellet and turned away from the hopper.  Finally, after 20 minutes Lil' Sebastian had fully associated the sugar pellets with the sound of the hopper.  We knew magazine training was complete when Lil' Sebastian approached the hopper consistently, when food was presented in the hopper, regardless of where she was in the operant box.  Lil' Sebastian had been reinforced 51 times in total, and had accidentally pressed the lever once and was rewarded for it anyway. This magazine training session was similar to what we discussed in class and how the book described it mainly because she started off very uninterested in the food and hopper, and ended up becoming very familiar with it.

Here's another picture of Lil' Sebastian in her operant box #2!

Below is the cumulative record for the magazine training: