Questions:

Part A: Habituation and observation

Important concepts and vocabulary in this lab part: habituation; observation; momentary time sampling

Overview: The rat will be placed into the operant chamber for the first time. He will explore the chamber while you take data on his behavior. You will observe habituation in this session.

Supplies: timer, behavioral taxonomy, data recording sheet

Preparation: Familiarize yourself well with the behavioral taxonomy of the rat provided in class. Get a data recording sheet ready. Each line of the page represents a 15-second interval. Notice the flow of the data recording sheet (e.g. where is timepoint 10 minutes 15 seconds?)

Procedure: Place the rat into the chamber, and return to your seat quickly. Start your timer immediately, and get ready – data collection begins 15 seconds later. Student 1 is the timer who watches the clock and says “now” each time a 15-second interval occurs. Student 2 records data. When Student 1 says “now” (and only then), Student 2 looks at what the rat is doing and records a single code on the data sheet. This may take some practice.

            This method is called momentary time sampling. There are many ways to take data on behavior. All methods have advantages and disadvantages; can you identify some of each for momentary time sampling? What types of behaviors would it be better/worse for? For the behaviors it would be worse for, what might you do instead?

            Part A of this lab (habituation) will take only one session.

Work product: You should finish with a filled-in data recording sheet. Your session likely did not go the full 30 minutes – that is ok.

Your lab report will not include your entire data collection sheet with all the timepoints. It will include the following figures:

Figure 1: Make a bar graph of your overall count data, showing the frequencies of each behavior.

Figure 2: Next, identify the top 4 most common behaviors overall, and make a second graph showing how the frequencies of just those 4 behaviors changed over the course of the session (This format could work a few different ways – think carefully about what goes on the horizontal axis)

Part B: Magazine training

Important concepts and vocabulary in this lab part: magazine training; latency

Overview: Through magazine training the rat will learn to respond to the mechanical noise that is associated with water delivery and to regularly drink water when it is dispensed.

Supplies: timer, data recording sheet, access to the button that delivers water; water-deprived rat

Preparation: Get ready to record data: The data recording sheet is provided. You will record each time of water delivery and each corresponding time of drinking. This will let you later calculate the latency (latencies) to drinking.  The next trial begins when the rat finishes drinking the previous reinforcer (or at the start of the session).

Drinking is operationally defined as the “eye of the animal disappearing from view as the nose enters the water reservoir.”

Magazine training will probably take only one session. Do as many trials as will fit into the time you have for that session.

The bar does work. If the rat presses the bar, water will be delivered automatically. Record the time of the bar press as if you had manually delivered the water, and make a note on your data sheet in the rightmost column that this was a bar press (B).

Procedure: Place the rat into the chamber. At any point (just arbitrarily), dispense some water into the water well (using the button on the wall) and wait for the rat to drink. When he drinks, this completes trial 1. Do not continue to dispense water while the rat stands directly in front of the water dispenser; wait for him to walk away and do something else. At another arbitrary time a few seconds later, dispense water again (trial 2). Try to make these times arbitrary – he shouldn’t be required to do anything in particular to get water (yet). Also avoid creating a pattern where he walks away, gets water, walks away, gets water… across trials, provide the water when he is doing a variety of things.

I suggest Student 1 observes the rat, pushes the water delivery button and calls out when she does so, and calls out when the rat drinks; Student 2 writes down the times of each event.

Your rat is magazine trained when he reliably approaches the dispenser from anywhere in the chamber whenever it dispenses water. This takes more than a few trials. Once successful, keep doing more trials to strengthen the behavior. Show Kevin or Dr. Y when your rat is magazine trained.

Work product: Calculate the latency for each trial. Make a figure showing the latencies and comment on how they changed over the course of the session (results), and why (discussion). Your horizontal axis should be trials.

Part C: Shaping

Important concepts and vocabulary in this lab part: shaping; successive approximations; acquisition; extinction; continuous reinforcement (FR1)

Overview: The goal of shaping is to get the rat to press the bar repeatedly by reinforcing successive approximations of the bar-pressing response. At the same time, you will be putting previous approximations on extinction. Progress toward bar pressing requires keen observation of the target behavior and careful timing of reinforcement.

Supplies: Timer, data recording sheet – make your own – this will be a running log of events and times (See below)

Preparation:  The operant chamber is set up so that each bar press will result in water delivery (continuous reinforcement, FR1). The button on the wall still dispenses water each time you press it, too.

            Write out your planned list of approximations: the behaviors for which the rat will earn a reinforcer that lead up to bar-pressing. The first behavior should be something he already does sometimes. The subsequent behaviors should get him closer and closer to pressing the bar. Whichever behavior he is currently working on in the list, all previous behaviors do not earn a reinforcer (they are on extinction).

Procedure: Patience and precision. Wait for the behavior to appear, and deliver the reinforcer at that precise moment (not once he has moved onto the next behavior). You have to be fast! Once you reinforce one behavior in your list, know what the next criterion is right away.

            If the rat goes a long time without a reinforcer, and behavior starts to get weaker (he’s not doing much), “go back to kindergarten” – relax your response requirements so that he can get some reinforcers and start again from there.

            Once he presses the bar once or twice, the operant chamber will deliver the water – you do not need to use the button anymore. When the rat starts bar-pressing and the chamber delivers water, the computer records the data and you will be provided with these data.

            If shaping takes more than one session, expect to start the second session with a review of previously-learned skills.

I suggest Student 1 memorizes the list of behavioral steps, then watches the rat and calls out events and operates the water button, and Student 2 writes out the event log with times. You should both get experience in each role, unless shaping happens really fast.

Record the following during each shaping session:

• event time when you press the reinforcer button
• what the rat was doing when you pressed the button
• event time of any bar presses
• event time when the rat took a drink
• any behavior of special interest

Record the actual sequence of successive approximations, which may vary from your plan.

Afterward, calculate the following summary data: total time in the session, the number of bar presses, and the number of water reinforcers delivered.

Work Product: Present your event log in a table that shows how the shaping process proceeded, and present your summary data. Describe the process you used, showing an understanding of the principles of shaping. Comment on the shaping process: did it go as planned? What deviations occurred and why? What worked well?

Revisit the taxonomy of rat behaviors from lab part A. How did the frequency of behaviors change over the course of the shaping session? (Don’t provide data on this, just describe your observations in words)

 Answers:

Behavioral Psychology

Introduction:

Behavioral psychology is the study of the connection between the mind and the behavior. Researchers and scientists always bring to our understanding why people or animals behave the way they do and try to discover the pattern in our actions and behavior. Behaviorism is principally concerned with noticeable behavior. Behavioral psychology performed on rats in the laboratory was to examine the actions of a rat at some given conditions and to come out with the required results.

Objectives of the Experiment

The main purpose of the laboratory was to assist in achieving the required objectives by giving the opportunity to carry out the experiment and become proficient in laboratory techniques and the use of the instruments (O’Leary, Gunn, & Brown, 2013). The learning goals of this experiment were to gain an understanding of the scientific progression and the experimental procedures to get more advanced in the scientific field (Mohammed, n.d). The laboratory was illustrated for the performance of the experiment to illustrate the combined use of many behavioral tests through pharmacological and genetic replicas and allow us to establish an in-depth behavioral profile. The anecdotal of the significant concept of the laboratory was organization of the tests, collection of the tasters, reporting of the results and recovering the data designated. Habituation is a diminution in response to a stimulus after repeated exhibitions (Galef, 2013). An observation made during a habituation lab could have the following outcomes; where an organism decreases its response to a stimulus after prolonged repetition of the same stimulus. Basically, the organism naturally learns many ways to stop showing any response to the stimulus which biologically becomes irrelevant (Gomez-Marin, Paton, Kampff, Costa, & Mainen, 2014). This is illustrated by a situation where an organism may habituate to continuous sudden loud noises especially when they are repeatedly accustomed to the fact that such behaviors have no consequences.

Method

The subjects in this particular experiment were two Sprague Dawley rats, the 1st rat (sally) was a 5-month-old female, the second rat (sam) was two-month-old male (Rats). An experiment commenced with one rat (sally) that was to be taught to press a bar to get the result of its action which in this experiment was water. This was only possible when the rat underwent a sequence of different stages.

The behaviors of the rats were measured using computer software that surveyed the activity of bar presses and reinforcement within an operant chamber A (Devarakonda, Nguyen, & Kravitz, 2016).

Consequently, the materials in this experiment included an operant chamber within room 2.  There was also bar press connected to a water feeder and a green light that flashed each time the bar was pressed.in the habituation process a rat taxonomy data sheet was included the following list of behaviors, “bar press”, :bar touch”, “magazine entry”, “object touch”, “rest”, “groom self”, among others. Along with their definitions and another data sheet used for recording those behaviors.

The procedure followed to have the rat get to the water successfully would be outlined as follows in several phases;

Habituation is the phase where the baseline behavior provides the essential data that can be used in future to make self-reliable individualized training. Emphasis is put on the existing pattern of behavior (Tighe & Leaton, 2016). During the Habituation/Observation Sally was positioned randomly inside of the chamber and monitored, two rats were finally trained to accomplish supposed different activities through the skills of classical conditioning. Originally, the first rat, Sally, was classically conditioned

The second phase is Magazine Training/shaping phases includes the process where positive stimuli and the reinforcer is continuously paired a behavior effectively (Reid, Futch, Ball, Knight, & Tucker, 2017). During this process, the behavior is shaped in line with the approach of Continuous Schedules of Reinforcements. For this particular experiment, two rats were trained to bar press and push around a ping-pong ball through the use of aids of water. After several sessions, the rat learned that if they did a certain behavior the reward would be water. In the end even just a familiar sound from the chamber was enough for the rats to detect.

Room 1

There are two principles of regulation as stated by Dom Jam; 1. Regulated variables;                          2. Spontaneous recovery where if the stimuli is withdrawn as a result of habituation training, then the response tends to be of recovery nature over time.

Spontaneous recovery is in most cases associated with classical conditioning for learning. In classical conditioning learning, an organism tries to learn to associate an environmental stimulus producing a response that is in no way conditioned, and that the stimulus that had initially been neutral results in its own response corresponding to that from an unconditioned stimulus (Wilson, Takahashi, Schoenbaum, & Niv, 2014). Pavlov tested this behavior by tested how dogs could behave towards food through examination of salivation when the dog sees food. Such classical conditioning methods still try to unveil some of the most psychological behavior exhibited by most of the animals including human beings.

Conclusion

The main purpose of the lab was achieved as it clearly brought out the psychological behavior of the rats under different conditions and situations they are presented in. bringing out clearly out they respond to elements like noise when it is repeatedly presented to them. Therefore I would conclude that lab process was successful and this result can be used to compare the behavioral psychology of different organisms in the different strategic situations. There were no surprises though at some point the rats’ rate of response decreased and totally declined later. This was an expected observation given the earlier observations.

References

Devarakonda, K., Nguyen, K. P., & Kravitz, A. V. (2016). ROBucket: a low cost operant chamber based on the Arduino microcontroller. Behavior research methods, 48(2), 503-509.

Galef, B. G. (2013). IMITATION IN ANIMALS: HISTORY, DEFINITION, AND INTERPRETATION OF DATA FROM THE PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY. Social learning , pp. 15-40.

Gomez-Marin, A., Paton, J. J., Kampff, A. R., Costa, R. M., & Mainen, Z. F. (2014). Big behavioral data: psychology, ethology and the foundations of neuroscience. Nature neuroscience, 17(11), 1455.

Mohammed, M. A. (n.d). Knowledge Sharing to Enhance Scientific Research Among Universities.

O’Leary, T. P., Gunn, R. K., & Brown, R. E. (2013). What are we measuring when we test strain differences in anxiety in mice? Behavior genetics, 43(1), 34-50.

Rats, C. O. (n.d.). Sprague Dawley® Rat. stress, 11, 44.

Reid, A. K., Futch, S. E., Ball, K. M., Knight, A. G., & Tucker, M. (2017). Assessment of progressively delayed prompts on guided skill learning in rats. Learning & behavior, 45(1), 62-75.

Tighe, T. J., & Leaton, R. N. (2016). Habituation: Perspectives from child development, animal behavior, and neurophysiology. Routledge.

Wilson, R. C., Takahashi, Y. K., Schoenbaum, G., & Niv, Y. (2014). Orbitofrontal cortex as a cognitive map of task space. Neuron, 81(2), 267-279.