Continuing Shaping

     The second day of shaping for Ms. Jingles was not as good as we hoped it would be. I was the trainer on this day, and our main goal was to get her to consistently press the bar on her own. While she stayed around the bar and in the area around the bar, she seemed to have issues with pressing it on her own. She would put her nose on the bar, raise her paws over the bar, and even set her paws on top of the bar without pressing it. While this was very frustrating for us as trainers, I still felt like the focus and attention she put on the bar was an improvement from the previous day. 

     The session lasted 22 minutes. During the session I manually reinforced her 66 times, and during the last minute and a half of training she was able to press the bar herself 3 times. This was very exciting and gave us hope that she would do much better during the next training session.

     Overall, it took 3 days to shape Ms. Jingles. During the third training session it looked like she was beginning to build the association between pressing the bar and food coming out of the hopper. We could tell because anytime she touched or rested her paws on the lever, she would immediately go check the hopper for food. She also appeared to be attempting to press the bar, but just was not pressing hard enough. Eventually she realized that food only came out when she pressed the bar down far enough.

     I felt like our shaping experience was very similar to what we learned about in class. She had to learn a progression of behaviors in order to get to actually pressing the bar, which was something that was mentioned in class.