Pixie The Rat

  Overall, I enjoyed the rat training experience. At first I was hesitant just because I had never done anything like this before. Handling the rat was scary for me. I could tell that Pixie sensed that I was nervous around her. Over time, I became less avoidant and interacted more. I was surprised at how fast she learned. She picked up on the different reinforcement schedules fairly quickly and did really well. We had some slow progression at the beginning of most sessions, but after the first 5 minutes or so she was progressing quickly. This was an experience that I will probably never forget! 

One problem that we had when it came to Pixies training was her slight "forgetfulness" over the weekend. We did not get to train most weekends, so she would go 2-3 days without having any type of training. Almost every following Monday, we would have a really slow start. It would take Pixie a good 5 minutes to get familiar with the box and remember what she needed to do. We tried to fix this problem by sometimes tapping on the right side of the box to help guide her attention back over to the lever. We did not do this every time, but it seemed to help. She would catch on eventually and always make progress! 

 On 10/4 and 10/5 we put Pixie through extinction so that she could go back on free feed. She did not do very well on extinction. On the first day of extinction we ran the program for about 26 minutes. Within those 26 minutes she pressed the lever a total of 307 times. This was a major decline from the previous FR schedules that we had been on. Pixie was really uninterested with being in the box and did alot of grooming both days. I would like to say that the second day of extinction was better, but it was not. She only pressed the bar 202 times for the second day. We could tell that because she was not getting rewarded that she was not interested in engaging with the lever. We did not see any spontaneous recovery or extinction burts within either training session. 

 On 10/3 we finished our last FR schedule. Pixie made it all the way to FR15. Although she may have not has as many responses as we'd hoped, she did do very well. For FR15 she had 642 responses. As the other schedules, this one may have been the hardest for her. It was difficult to keep her attention due to the fact that she was not being reinforced as frequently as she was used too. In order for her to get a pellet, she had to press the lever 15 times. This schedule the others were fixed, so it didnt matter how long it took for her to press the lever, as long as she pressed it 15 times. For this training session she weighed 210.2g and we fed her 8.1g. Now that our last schedule has been complete we can now start extinction! 

 On 9/30 we trained on FR12. Pixie has been making alot of progress. We trained for the full 3o minutes to ensure that she had plenty of time to get reinforced. She had 709 responses and that was all from her pressing the lever. It did take a little time to understand that she had to press the lever a lot of times before she would get a pellet. This happened almost every time we trained though. After the first couple of tries and no reinforcement she began to consistently press the lever, more than 12 times so she would get a pellet. At the end of the session we weighed her for the day. She weighed 216.2g and we fed her 5.9g. I hope we can get through a couple more successful FR schedules before training is over!