1 Operant Conditioning with Sniffy 1 Operant Conditioning with Sniffy 2
2 Operant Conditioning with Sniffy Muyu Situ Hunter College, City University of New York
Method Subject The virtual rat, Sniffy, comes from a program designed for students to have hand-on experience performing experiments dealing with classical and operant conditioning. In order to obtain realism in Sniffy program, the creators filmed a real rat and then pieced together different frames to create the animation of Sniffy. Unlike a real rat, Sniffy can restart the learning process and is not affected by external factors; therefore we can perform a whole other experiment with Sniffy to test other effects of conditioning and increase the amount of data we can obtain.
3 Apparatus The equipment used for this study was a 21-inch iMac computer, which ran on the Microsoft Windows 7 software. 4 The program used was Sniffy the Virtual Rat, Pro Version 3.0. Within the program, Sniffy was placed…show more content… In order to do this, we wait for Sniffy to approach the food hopper to avoid Sniffy from associating food with something else, and then we press the space bar to deliver a food pellet. 6 We continue this pattern until the lab assistant window says that association is strong enough to begin shaping Sniffy’s behavior. Now we began to shape Sniffy’s behavior and teach Sniffy to press the bar on his own. To do this, we reward Sniffy when he faces the back wall and raises up anywhere in the chamber. We continue rewarding Sniffy when he rears closer and closer to the back wall and the bar until he begins to press the bar ten to twelve times in quick succession, then we stop shaping and allow Sniffy to learn on his own. When the lab assistant window displays that sniffy has completed training, then we saved the file as a bar-trained Sniffy, which we will use further on in our