Rats Gone Wild!
As noted throughout my posts, one of the problems I had in training Mitzy was "extra" behavior and effort that she put into her bar presses. In early FR training, Mitzy would put increasing effort into each of her presses. For example, in FR3, she would (1) press the bar normally, receiving no food, (2) press and hold the bar for a few seconds, still receiving no food, and (3) press. hold, and bite the bar, finally receiving her food. I was worried that, as this behavior continue to earn her rewards, she would form an association between her "added effort" and the consequence (receiving a pellet).
After talking to other students, I came to see that variations of this behavior are a common problem in training, and we briefly discussed this in class. Overall, due to Mitzy's gradual increase in response rate and her large number of bar presses per session, I concluded that this was not a major interference in her learning process. However, I think that if I had seen this pattern of behavior sooner (e.g. in a much lower FR schedule), I likely would have switched to manual reinforcement on whatever our current schedule was. This way, I could have reinforced every 3, 5, 7, etc bar presses only, rather than letting the operant box automatically reinforce any behavior that resulted in a bar press.
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