Lilly's Virtual Friend: A Post on Sniffy

   As part of this course, we also had to train a virtual rat named Sniffy. Although he wasn't nearly as exciting as the real thing, it was excellent practice for magazine training and shaping Lilly. The process of magazine training and shaping also went by a lot more quickly with Sniffy than with my live rat. With Sniffy, it only took a little over an hour to shape, while it took several days to shape Lilly. In addition, after finishing the shaping of Sniffy, I decided to put it on a VI schedule. This was schedule was obviously different from shaping, especially because Sniffy pressed the bar on a more regular schedule than he did during shaping.
   One positive of working with Sniffy is that I got some good training tips for Lilly. For example, I learned that it's helpful to reward your rat when they rear up over the lever, because that teaches them that they should be over it in order to push down. Also, because I put Lilly on an advanced FR schedule, I put Sniffy on a VI schedule. It was interesting to see the differences between the two schedules, and I enjoyed having the opportunity to see a different kind of training schedule. I would definitely recommend using both the live and virtual rat for future classes- it's a great opportunity to learn new ways of training, and it helps immensely with training the live rat.

This is a picture of Sniffy, after I finished the shaping process. You can see from the graph that Sniffy fully understands the association between sound and food.