1. During magazine training and shaping, I messed up with timing the reinforcements periodically, especially at first. This caused problems with Lil Sebastian learning the correct behavior, and resulted in a multitude of behaviors instead of a desired one (attention to the lever). Eventually I got better with timing the reinforcements appropriately, and Lil Sebastian became less confused and learned the behavior appropriately. Unfortunately I do not know of a way to avoid this problem without simply practicing it with Lil Sebastian, because I did improve my timing with time and practice.
2. Another issue my partner and I had was Lil Sebastian was overly interested and preoccupied with the front left corner of the operant box (box #2). We learned from Madeline who used the same box last year, and from other experimenters using our box that their rats had the same issue, and it was disruptive to the learning process. Luckily, Lil Sebastian's interest in the corner dwindled less and less as the FR schedules moved forward. None the less, during magazine training and shaping this was a nuisance. For whatever the reason, Lil Sebastian would rather stick her nose in that corner than do anything else for moderate periods of time. Below is a video displaying this weird behavior:
My partner and I thought there was something on the floor of the cage, or in the chips. So we cleaned the chips out, but Madeline said she cleaned the whole cage last year and it did nothing to her rats corner obsession. So unfortunately this annoyance was simply endured during training periods, but luckily Lil Sebastian became less interested in it as the training sessions went on. The only way I can think of to get rid of this problem would be to train in a different box or get a whole new box, since this behavior is universal for everyone who used this box.
3. One of the earlier training days, pellets were not being dropped in our hopper. At first I thought I set up the program incorrectly, but then noticed the food chamber was releasing pellets. I simply slid a pipe cleaner down the chute of the hopper, and many pellets were released at the bottom. After cleaning them out, we started over with our training for that day and this never occurred again.
4. Keeping Lil Sebastian's target weight proved to be difficult task throughout training. It almost seemed she would just gain or lose weight at will, regardless of how much food she ate. Her weight fluctuated really inconsistently. Eventually my partner and I disregarded this problem and simply fed her a consistent amount each day because it did not seem to disrupt training sessions very much after we recognized the issue. Lil Sebastian still seemed motivated enough on each day. Her motivation only seemed to be effected by our last problem discussed below.
5. The last problem my partner and I had was we struggled to keep the same training time for every day, though the majority of our training sessions were at the same time of each day. We are both very busy and our schedules change frequently day to day so sometimes we would have to come in much earlier than planned to train. This clearly confused Lil Sebastian sometimes and those days tended to be less successful than when we were more consistent with our training time in successive days. After the first week we recognized this problem and tried to keep our training sessions no earlier than an hour and half before our regular time. We could of simply scheduled a better training time, but unfortunately there is not a single time for each day of the week that does won't interfere with both our schedules.
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