Friday October 25, 2002

Teaching rats

Today in the psych lab, we were shaping our rats to barpress. The first two rats learned surprisingly quickly. Within five minutes, we had each slamming that bar for food every two seconds. We were confident that we'd have all four trained before the end of the period, but rat #3 decided to get feisty. My lab partner picked him up out of his cage to put him in the skinner box when he started squirming around violently and fell to the floor. The room was pitch black, and we lost him. My professor had to come in and turn the lights on to look for the little guy. After a few minutes we found him accross the room, and continued the experiment with the lights on. We only got three of our rats trained, and my lab partner was a tad bit embarrased. My group elected me to be the official rat wrangler for the three of us, so now I get to move them every lab. Yay.