Live vs. Virtual Rat

Some of this will reiterate what was said in my previous Sniffy post, but I will answer the questions specifically to ensure everything has been covered.

Shaping for my Lil Sebastian took 2, 30 minute training sessions. Whereas shaping for Sniffy only roughly took 30 minutes.

Below is the cumulative record of Lil Sebastian's FR1 Schedule

Below is the cumulative record for Sniffy's FR1 Schedule

There are small differences between the two cumulative record for the live and virtual rat.  As you would probably assume, the virtual rats cumulative record is much more consistent and "ideal" with responses occurring much more steadily. On the contrary, the live rats cumulative record shows more variability and more breaks in responses, which should be expected since the live rat isn't programed to respond.

There were not many differences between magazine training the live rat and the virtual rat.  They both took roughly 20 minutes, and it simply was presenting the food when they were not focusing on the hopper.

Shaping the live rat was more difficult than the virtual rat.  The virtual rat is programed to eventually respond correctly, and timing was less sensitive. Though sometimes the program would not respond timely enough to reinforce Sniffy. Obviously a live rat has a temperament and different moods and can be satiated, and Sniffy was not effected by these factors.  A multitude of different behaviors are also present at one time with a live rat, whereas Sniffy only has behaviors that were programed for him, so they are more limited.  The difficulty really arose when having to use proper timing with Lil Sebastian's reinforcements.  Lil Sebastian would also be more susceptible to distractions, which was not a concern with Sniffy.

I learned from Sniffy the overall outline and steps you should use when training a live rat, which was helpful when shaping Lil Sebastian for the first time.  But I don't believe you can actually understand the sensitivity and complexity of shaping a live rat without actually attempting it.  There is just so much variability that goes into shaping a live organism which taught me to fully respect trained animals and their owners for the time they dedicated to training them.

I think the Sniffy program was helpful, especially since the majority of the class probably had not had experience with shaping or training an organism to do something in a lab setting.  I think actually getting to train a live rat is an awesome experience. It makes learning the concepts in class much more rewarding because we can see what we're talking about in the lab.