Shaping Day 1 & 2

 Catnip on Day 2!

Over the course of two days, it took approximately 55 minutes and 43 seconds to shape Catnip. During day 1 we trained the entire 30 minutes but she seemed to get bored and only pushed the lever by herself 11 times. I had rewarded her 92 times during the session but felt as if I had been underrewarding her for her behavior. I trained her by beggining with rewarding her if her nose was touching the bar, then I moved onto her head being above the bar. This was working so then I only would reaward her if her head was above the bar and paws where on top of the bar. My rat seemed to learn this easily because she began to push the lever on her own toward the end of training time. This was proven to be effective because during the first 5 minutes of day 2 she began to push the lever all by herself. During the 25 minutes in training she pressed the lever on her own a total of 178 times and I only used the hand switch once. I feel as if this was similar to the book when it talks about the laws of shaping. I had to remind myself that I needed to only train one criteria at a time and that I could not just stop the session just because I felt like she was not doing good. I had to stay motivated on training her and allow her to do her thing even though day 1 of shaping made me feel like she would not get the hang of it.