When Mitzy started the session, she immediately began to press the bar rapidly and persistently (as was reinforced in previous training). Throughout the session, she also demonstrated a great deal of spontaneous recovery of previously-enforced behaviors. As I mentioned before, bar biting was a problem throughout the two weeks of training, but in extinction, she displayed a dramatically greater rate of such behaviors. Mitzy was biting the bar, holding it down, pressing up on it with her nose, and even biting the magazine as she was initially shaped to do in the first days of training.
In addition, she appeared quite agitated at the beginning of both extinction session, jumping and rearing around different areas of the box. However, after some time (~10 minutes), she would begin to more calmly explore the box, stopping to sniff or groom. This suggested to me that the instrumental response was likely on its way to extinction (or at least, was getting closer).
The following video was taken in the 10-15 minute interval on Day 1 of extinction:
Although I did not see full extinction of the behavior, I believe that it would have been (mostly) reached if we extinguished for more than 2 days.
As you can see from the graph, Mitzy showed a dramatic decrease in response for the first 20 minutes of each extinction session, and then experienced a bit of an extinction burst in the 20-25 minute interval. In addition, she began her second day of training with a fairly large number of bar presses, but demonstrated an overall decrease from the previous session.
Extinction Day 2 Cumulative Record
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