Experimental Psychology: Learning And Behavior Analysis

This semester in Experimental psychology: Learning and Behaviors we started lab by learning to understand the responsibilities on how to use animals in a laboratory setting. We had to pass a test regarding the ethics of the treatment of animals. These ethics involved the institution, state, and federal regulations. Once we finished this process we received 15 Syrian male hamsters that were only 22 days old. We got split into a group of two, and got to care for one hamster per group. Each group received a cage, water, bedding, and hamster food. The first week we received them they had to be acclimated, and get use to their new habitat. The second week we had to begin to handle them and have them get use to us. We needed to do this without …show more content…
Following the handling of the hamster we found their reinforcements that they liked best. Our hamster started off with fruit loops, and then moved on to liking the seeds more. As some groups were trying to find the reinforcements for their hamster other groups were learning to habituate their hamsters to the mazes. This getting them ready for the actual trials in the T-maze. When we began the first day of trials we started off by handling our hamster and trying to get him active. Starting off each trial we had to put our food reinforcement in a bowl either on the left arm of the maze or the right arm of the maze. Once we got our food ready, we pulled out our timers and set our hamster in the T-maze. One of us was in charge of the hamster and the food, while the other person was in charge of the timer and data collecting. Each trial consisted of us lifting the plastic cover and allowing the hamster to either go to the side with the checkered pattern wall or the opposite side. Depending on each trial the reinforcement changed from either the left side or the right side. If our hamster chose the right arm with the reinforcement then we determined the time, and took him out right away after he ate one of the reinforcements. Then we began …show more content…
For the first seven trials six out of seven of those trials he went to the wrong arm, and the one time he went to the right one it took him 12.25 seconds. He barely paid any attention to the food bowls at each of the arm, but did more exploring. He sniffed around, chewed on the walls, and nudged on the plastic above him. On a different day we ran another seven different trials. Which, our hamster did much better on this day then the trial day before. During these trials he chose the right arm correct three out of four times. Even though he chose the correct side more this time around his times on choosing the right side did decrease drastically. The last day we ran trails we ran a total of nine trials. We personally believe that it was his best worst day yet. We believe it was the worst day, because all he was trying to do was escape and looked very anxious to get out of the T-maze. We were very worried that we were stressing him out too much so we almost stopped running trials. Then we just assumed it was only because Dr. Burns turned the lights off for a couple hours before we started running trials. We also say this was his best day, because he chose more arms right and he had his fastest times during this last day of trial running. To put it all together our hamster chose the arms with the reinforcements a little less than half of the time. When he did get it right it took