Essay On Sniffy The Virtual Rat

PURPOSE The main goal of experiment three was to test a rat’s ability to be conditioned to perform a behavior, and then relearn the same behavior after an extinction period. After ensuring that the rat was conditioned on a continuous reinforcement schedule (CRF), the next goal in the experiment was to extinct the previously learned behavior of lever pressing and receiving a food pellet. Once the behavior was extinct, the rat was reconditioned to lever press on a conditioned reinforcement schedule. The goal of the experiment was to demonstrate that a behavior could be learned, extinct, and then relearned.

After the meat powder and bell were presented together several times, the bell was used alone. Pavlov’s dogs, as predicted, responded by salivating to the sound of the bell without the food. The bell began as a neutral stimulus (i.e. the bell itself did not produce the dogs. However, by pairing the bell with the stimulus that did produce the salivation response, the bell was able to acquire the ability to trigger the salivation response. Pavlov therefore demonstrated how stimulus-response are formed. He dedicated much of the rest of his career further exploring this finding. In technical terms, the meat powder is considered an unconditioned stimulus and the dog’s salivation is the unconditioned response. The bell is a neutral stimulus until the dog learns to associate the bell with food. Then the bell becomes a conditioned stimulus which produces the conditioned response of salivation after repeated pairings between the bell and food. John B. Watson further extended Pavlov’s work and applied it to human beings. Around 1921, Watson studied Albert, an 11-month-old infant child. The goal of the study was to condition Albert to become afraid of a white rat by pairing the white rat with a very loud noise. Behavior modification is a technique concerning the change in the undesired behavior and enhancing desired behavior. It is an approach that aims to modify the behavior of a

Ivan Pavlov and B.F. Skinner both studied learning, in which they both did different experiments on different animals and with different conditioning. Classical conditioning is the process in which two stimuli become linked; once this association has been recognized, an originally neutral stimulus is conditioned to provoke an involuntary response. The dogs in Pavlov’s studies learned to associate countless stimuli with the expectation of food, which caused in them salivating when the stimuli were presented. Pavlov revealed how such associations are learned, and referred to this process as conditioning. While the

Classical and operant conditioning are two important concepts central to behavioral psychology. While both result in learning, the processes are quite different. In order to understand how each of these behavior modification techniques can be used, it is also essential to understand how classical conditioning and operant conditioning differ from one another. Both classical and operant learning are psychological processes that lead to learning. Here learning refers to the process by which changes in behavior, including actions, emotions, thoughts, and the responses of muscles and glands,

Background (key works): Reinforcement theory is rooted in theory of operant conditioning based primarily on the work of the American behavior scientist B.F. Skinner (Borkowski, 2011). In contrast to Ivan Pavlov’ respondent conditioning controlled by

Skinner (1948) was also influenced by Thorndike’s (1898) operant conditioning of cats and went on to use similar techniques to study conditioning in rats. Skinner studied how behaviour that is rewarded will be repeated, unlike behaviour that has a negative consequence. Skinner (1948) placed hungry rats in a ‘skinner box’ with a lever, when the lever was pressed, food was released and the rats soon learned that when they pressed the lever they would be rewarded. Skinner (1948) then placed rats in another box and administered them with an electric current. If the rats pressed the lever in this box it would stop the discomfort of the current. After repeating the rats quickly learnt to press the lever. Skinner (1948) argued that all human behaviour can be learned through operant conditioning (McLeod 2015).

This lab tests different forms of conditioning on a virtual rat named Sniffy. In this experiment we began with the virtual rat completely unconditioned and then worked towards getting Sniffy to pull the lever and get food on his own. We went through many steps to complete this task starting with getting Sniffy to notice the food chamber, the lever, and finally having Sniffy realize he can obtain food whenever he wanted by pressing the lever. Then, pushing it further, we made him press the level two, three, four and then five times to receive one pellet. All of these steps tested the idea that receiving the food as a reward will allow Sniffy to realize the benefits of learning and conditioning himself to do things that have a positive outcome more.

In 1903 a Russian physiologist by the name of Ivan Pavlov first developed an experiential model of learning called Classical Conditioning (Lautenheiser 1999). An example if Classical Conditioning would be ringing a bell when it is time for your pet to eat. The pet hears the bell and over time is conditioned that when the bell rings its dinner time thus begins to salivate, and eventually learns to be conditioned to responding to the bell in a specific manner. The bases was that neutral stimulus would be put together with an excitatory one and over time the neutral stimulus would, at some point down the line elicit the response that was associated with the original unlearned response. Pavlov later added an element known as the nonexcitatory, conditioned stimulus which is but together with an unconditioned stimulus (Lautenheiser 1999).

Two important learning theories of behaviourist perspective are classical conditioning (Ivan Pavlov 1849-1936) experiments with dogs and operant conditioning (Thorndike’s and B.F Skinner).

The goal of the experiment is to determine whether sniffy the rat will associate a flash of light with the tone which is presented with a conditioned stimulus of a tone. It is predicted that sniffy will eventually learn to associate to light with the tone and this will elicit a conditioned response in terms of the shock presented in stage one. There were four stages in the experiment each consisted of five trials over the course of five minutes, the first stage was shown with the first stimulus of a medium tone followed by a second stimulus of a shock on high. The second stage had a first stimulus of a medium light followed by a medium tone. The third stage included only a medium tone and the fourth stage was presented with a medium light.

The science of animal behavior explained through ABA is a fascinating area of study. Relatively little research has been done pertaining to dog behavior, and it is my goal to aid in the expansion of this field of research. Caio Miguel is one who holds an interest parallel to my own regarding dog behavior research. After a pilot study using my own dog, along with a few others, we successfully trained the subjects a matching-to-sample skill. My goal is to further that research in order to discover new ways the principles of ABA can be applied or modified to study non-human

An unexpected imitation test was the then conducted with the owner asking the dogs to remain on the blue carpet and pay attention to a chosen demonstrated action from table S1. Once they have demonstrated this action a predetermined retention interval, the time between the demonstrated action and the “Do it!” command, of one minute or one hour would be waited before the owner gave the dog the “Do it!” command. This test requires the assumption that a successful imitation of the demonstrated action was possible only if dogs encoded the action incidentally. It can be assumed that the imitation test was unexpected as there was no motivation for the dogs to remember the actions meaning that the test meets the requirements for testing episodic memory, which is assessed by an unexpected recall test.

After accessing the computer program on St. Francis Xavier’s server, the virtual rat (the subject) was shown to be wandering around the Skinner box. During the first project, the experimenter observes Sniffy’s behaviour. This rat is untrained and had to previous testing or training. For the first 10 minutes, the experimenter observed Sniffy’s behaviour and becomes familiar with the rats’ repertoire of behaviour. These behaviours are referred to as baseline behaviours. After observational behaviour, the baseline frequency of bar pressing per minutes is established. The cumulative record displayed on the screen shows ticks

As a dog owner, I know how important it is to teach your pets how to behave. Yet, it is important to understand how learning works so that you can develop a strategy to properly and quickly teach your dog. The example of training a dog to roll over is a great model for analysing the aspects of learning involved with this process. Understanding how operant conditioning works and how to reinforce a desired response to that stimuli will help trainers effectively teach dogs. Psychologists, such as Myers (2013), define learning as the process of acquiring new knowledge and behaviors. In this case we are specifically discussing the acquisition of a certain response to a stimulus. The stimulus is the trainer’s command and the desired behavior is the dog to roll over onto his back. These ideas all are based on Edward L. Thorndike’s principle called the law of effect, wherein he stated that behaviors followed by a positive outcomes are more likely to increase in probability. These are all important components of the learning process, especially on the level of training a dog or instilling a simple behavior.

For the following experiments, 22 virtual rat subjects, each supervised by its own experimenter, were subjected to operant conditioning techniques, followed by extinction, secondary reinforcement and spontaneous recovery. Since the same program was used for each of the 22 subjects, all the virtual rats can be considered to be identical to one another. Additionally, as a result of the food deprivation programming, all virtual rats are ready for the presentation of food as a reinforcer. Although each experiment consisted of 22 rats, the rats in experiment three are the same rats that were used in experiment one. Therefore, the total number of subjects is 44 instead of 66 because the same virtual rat subjects are used in two of the three experiments. In order to collect and monitor the relevant data, the program has various windows that display important information. The two