Shaping

     The total amount of minutes it took to train Betty was 364 minutes. We trained Betty by magazine training her on Day 1. After she was magazines trained, we started to shape her We shaped her for a total of 5 days. We shaped her by giving her a lot of reinforcers when she moved to the back of the operant box, when she moved close to the lever, sniffed the lever, touched the lever, and she was able to reinforce herself when she pressed the lever. At first, Betty thought she was getting reinforced for biting the lever, so we had to break that habit by not reinforcing her when she put her mouth on the lever. We had to watch closely and switch to the hand button only so we could break the habit. We strictly reinforced her sniffing and touching the lever on day two of shaping. 

    We learned that Betty understood that she had to press the lever to receive chocolate pellets. She was an easy rat to train; she lost interest sometimes and got frustrated. She became frustrated when she touched the lever and did not receive a chocolate pellet. The good thing about when she became frustrated was that she would start to press the lever repeatedly and receive reinforcement.