Welcome to Habibti's world

 

Make sure you tell Habibti how cute she is

    Before meeting the rats in the lab for the first time, I had quite a positive impression of them. I saw them as cute little animals that like to run around and these cute animals were harmless. I hadn't had the chance to deal with rats before so I can't really say my impression was truly based on anything specific. I was able to hold Habibti last week on two occasions and she was extremely soft and adorable both of these times happened since past Tuesday. My impression of rats hasn't changed much I still see a really cute animal running around everywhere in its cage and part of my impression being the same is caused by the little interactions I have had with Habibti. I will make sure to see how my impression changes throughout the semester when I get to handle Habibti a lot more and talk about it in my blogs. Reed and I decided to name our rat Habibti, it's arabic written as حبيبتي and it means my love, my darling, my beloved and some other sentimental words along those lines. The reason going with that name is simply because it is a word I say and add to random conversations while we're speaking in English so  I thought this would suit our rat really well and Reed agreed and voila, our lab rat was named Habibti.

 

 Magazine Training - Training day 1:

 

  The Magazine Training took a total of 5 minutes and 30 seconds. The criteria used to determine whether Habibti had been magazine trained was her ability to recognize where the food was being dropped whenever the pallet struck down and created a noise (a little "ding"). More importantly to truly determine whether she was magazine trained or not we waited for her to entirely be away from the lever/pallet drop location and more specifically have her back facing the lever/pallet drop location. Having all these conditions in place we manually dropped a pallet and observed how she reacted and Habibti just like the smart little rat she is turned around and headed to eat the pallet. To get her to that stage of the training we placed her in the operant chamber and started reinforcing any sort of movement that was close to the lever. Throughout that process, a random pattern of movement can be seen from Habibti's end. A lot of confusion can also be seen and the random movement in addition to the confusion reminded me of what was discussed in class especially reminded me of the activity where Sam and DD acted as rats we had to direct. We had discussed in class that the training is taking advantage of skills the rats already possessed and reinforcing them to get closer and closer to what we want them to do. In this case, we were reinforcing the close random movement that was getting Habibti closer to the pallet drop area. Makala told Reed and me more about magazine training and it followed some of the discussions held in class discussing lab and more specifically magazine training the rats as the first training session that had to be done.

Shaping - Training day 2:

 

    Manual Shaping Habibti took us an entire training session, or simply put it took us 30min to make sure she was properly ready to move on to the FR schedules. Shaping Habibti was an overall easy task that required a bit more time than expected. Shaping Habibti at first was done by reinforcing her random close-to-the-lever movements. Since she was magazine trained whenever she would get somewhere near the lever we would drop a pallet to reinforce that movement. Once she started understanding the fact that her presence next to the lever generated food and she would immediately head to the right corner of the box after having consumed the pallet, we started reinforcing any form of contact with the lever. As I mentioned previously, it wasn’t a hard task because Habibti caught on quickly and got the memo but her random movements that would suddenly take us a few step back was the tedious part of the shaping. Nevertheless, throughout the shaping process, we started reinforcing all forms of contact with the lever at first. Then to make sure she doesn’t simply sit under the lever and get reinforced for it we started reinforcing any contact with the lever that would lead her to push the lever. Slowly but surely we got her to focus on being on the upper part of the lever. Once that part was over Habibti started getting reinforced for clicking the lever. Clicking the lever produces a specific sound and that is how we can tell she started clicking the lever. At that point, she was ready for the FR schedules.

FR1/FR2 – Training day 3:

    We started off our first training day with FR1 but we slowly realized Habibti was killing it. I sadly could not find any pictures of how well she was doing which means I must’ve forgotten to take a picture of the number of responses but the graph that will be accompanying the blog will have the theoretical numbers of how many clicks she performed for the period of 5 minutes she was set on the FR1 schedule. But for FR2, in the duration of 30minutes, she got 323 clicks in. In the explanation part for the first training day, Habibti felt comfortable in the operant box and she performed so well in FR1 that we automatically switched to FR2. By switching to FR2 she had to press the level twice to get a single pallet of food. That is exactly what she did and her number of clicks started increasing compared to the FR1 clicks. At that point, she understood that clicking the lever delivered food.

FR3 – Training day 4:

 

    For training day 4, Habibti was working on the FR4 schedule, in other words she had to press the lever 4 times to receive a pallet. She got a total of 302 lever presses on her fourth training day. The number of presses on day 4 was lower than on day 3. It wasn’t too large of a difference for us to be extremely concerned. Habibti found a bit more difficulty pressing the lever multiple times. Some hesitation can be observed throughout that training day, Habibti would press it once or twice and then wait. The FR progression started impacting her slowly but she was able to adapt quite well and continue to reach 302 lever presses.

 

FR5 – Training day 5:

    On the fifth day of training, Habibti was put on FR5 and she reached 427 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti pressed the lever 5 times and received a food pallet. She did not struggle when she was put on FR5 and it is quite the opposite she performed much better than she had done on FR 3. 

 

FR7 – Training day 6:

 On the sixth day of training, Habibti was put on FR7 and she reached 531 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti pressed the lever 7 times and received a food pallet. She did not struggle when she was put on FR7 and it is quite the opposite she performed much better than she had done on FR 5. 

 

FR10 – Training day 7:

 

    On the seventh day of training, Habibti was put on FR10 and she reached 562 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti pressed the lever 10 times and received a food pallet. She did not struggle when she was put on FR10 and its quite the opposite she performed much better than she had done on FR 7

 

FR12 – Training day 8:

 On the eighth day of training, Habibti was put on FR12 and she reached 670 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti pressed the lever 12 times and received a food pallet. She did not struggle when she was put on FR 12and it is quite the opposite she performed much better than she had done on FR 10. 

FR15 – Training day 9:

 

On the ninth day of training, Habibti was put on FR15 and she reached 858 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti pressed the lever 15 times and received a food pallet. She did not struggle when she was put on FR15 and it's quite the opposite she performed much better than she had done on FR 12. 

FR18 – Training day 10:

 

    On the tenth day of training, Habibti was put on FR18 and she reached 891 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti pressed the lever 18 times and received a food pallet. She did not struggle when she was put on FR18 and she performed slightly better than she had done on FR 15. 

FR20 – Training day 11:

 

    On the eleventh day of training, Habibti was put on FR20 and she reached 1238 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti pressed the lever 20 times and received a food pallet. She did not struggle when she was put on FR20 and its quite the opposite she performed much better then she had done on FR 18. 

 

FR20 – Training day 12:

    On the twelfth day of training, Habibti was put on FR20 and she reached 1251 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti pressed the lever 20 times and received a food pallet. She did not struggle when she was put on FR20 and she performed slightly better than she had done on the previous FR 20 (training day 11). 

 

FR20 – Training day 13:

 On the thirteenth day of training, Habibti was put on FR20 and she reached 1131 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti pressed the lever 20 times and received a food pallet. She did not struggle when she was put on FR20 and funny enough she performed worse than she had done on the two previous FR 20 training days (training days 11 and 12). 

Extinction – Training day 14:

    On the fourteenth day of training, Habibti was put on extinction and she reached 784 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti was put on the extinction schedule so we would get rid of the lever-pressing mechanism that we had developed in her in the first place. The dispense of the food pallets was much different than it had been done in any of the FR schedules. A noticeable extinction burst was seen. Habibti would frantically be pressing the lever and get no absolute reward which seemed to make her demotivated to keep going.

Extinction – Training day 15:

    On the fifteenth day of training, Habibti was put on extinction and she reached 276 lever presses. Responding to the question “What happened?” Habibti was put on the extinction schedule so we would get rid of the lever-pressing mechanism that we had developed in her in the first place. The dispense of the food pallets was much different than it had been done in any of the FR schedules. A noticeable extinction burst was seen. Habibti would frantically be pressing the lever and get no absolute reward which seemed to make her demotivated to keep going. On the second day of extinction through the results, it is clear how effective the extinction process was. The number of lever-pressing dropped incredibly from the first day to the second day. Habibti pressed the lever 1/3 of the times she did on the first extinction day.

 

 

 

The Biggest Problem of the Century: Weighing Habibti

 

    Reed and I encountered a slight problem at the start and it was related to weighing Habibti. For some reason, Habibti did not like the metal bowl we at first used to weigh her. When we tried putting her in she completely freaked out, got out of the bowl, and started running around in the lab rat. Thankfully Dr.Trench was there to make sure things were fine. Other than that, we didn’t encounter any problems with the training. Everything went just fine from the first time Habibti stepped foot in the operant box to the final extinction session. I can say though the training process could’ve been done a bit better if we had taken into account the drop in lever presses from FR2 to FR3. If we had concentrated on that transition, I know for a fact Habibti would have reached much higher lever presses in the rest of the FR schedules. We should have let her either try FR3 on a complete other training day or put her back at FR2 do half a training session and switch to FR3 for the other half so she could have adjusted better. 

 

Chart and graph of the average number of responses per 30 min of training for each schedule of reinforcement Habibti was on:

Trainings (excluding extinction)	Lever presses per 30minutes
shaping	168
FR1	172
FR2	323
FR3	302
FR5	427
FR7	531
FR10	562
FR12	670
FR15	858
FR18	891
FR20	1208

 

 

The Infamous Weight Chart:

Date	Weight	Amount Fed	Notes
7-Sep	233	4g	Target weight = 210g
8-Sep	224.5	4.5g
9-Sep	215.6	6.4g
10-Sep	214.8	6.5g
11-Sep	206.7	6.8g
12-Sep	203.1	11.1g
13-Sep	205	11.1g
14-Sep	203.8	12.2g
15-Sep	204.2	12.4g	Magazine Training
16-Sep	203.7	13.2g
17-Sep	206.7	12.1g
18-Sep	207.7	12.5g
19-Sep	210.8	10.2g
20-Sep	214.8	10.4g	Manual Shaping
21-Sep	221.2	9.0g	FI1(15sec)/FR2
22-Sep	220.9	8.8g
23-Sep	212.9	10.4g
24-Sep	218.2	9.1g	FR3
25-Sep	216.9	10.0g	FR5
26-Sep	216.6	10.0g	FR7
27-Sep	221.1	9.0g	FR10
28-Sep	215.4	9.9g	FR12
29-Sep	219.8	9.0g	FR15
30-Sep	215.5	9.1g	FR18
1-Oct	214.4	9.2g	FR20
2-Oct	214.3	10.1g	FR20
3-Oct	214.4	9.8g	FR20
4-Oct	219.4	10.6g	Extinction
5-Oct	214.4	10.1g	Extinction

  

Habibti's extinction experience:

    Habibti responded very well to extinction and that is shown through the results we got. The number of lever presses went down which is quite literally the purpose of extinction, to eliminate a behavior. Extinction happens at a slow rate so it is understandable that the lever presses declined from the first session to the second one. The extinction burst was evident and it showed how frustrated Habibti was while pressing the lever. The absence of any reward started affecting her performance and it slowly but surely made her less and less motivated to continue pressing the lever.

Number of responses	Day 1 of Extinction	Day 2 of Extinction
5 min into the session	131	46
10min into the session	262	92
15min into the session	393	138
20min into the session	524	184
25min into the session	655	230
30min into the session	784	276

 During the extinction session at the lab, I did not track the progress of the lever presses every 5 minutes so I took the total number of lever presses at the end of each session and ran some calculations to come up with theoretical numbers at each five-minute interval. 

The Final Post:

It was a really fun and exciting experience. I never imagined myself taking care of a rat and little did I imagine myself teaching a rat how to press a lever. Habibti is an amazing rat and I will be taking care of her and giving her some awesome treats from time to time. I didn’t find anything wrong or unpleasant about the experience, I thoroughly enjoyed every part of it. I would say for improvements make the blog assignment more interactive or engaging. Doing the blogs felt more of an assignment answering short essays. I was surprised to look at the extinction results. I did not imagine it being as effective as it would be second day in, completely surprised me. Thankfully, I did not experience any major misconceptions throughout the Habibti experience. Overall it was an awesome experience and I will keep visiting Habibti making sure she’s getting spoiled from time to time with some treats. I have to make sure our little daughter gets fed something special from time to time and who knows I might just take her home and make her my pet.