Apollo Human Parenting

I imagine that the experience of conditioning Apollo has been much like human parenting: exciting and equally frustrating. After 6 days, Apollo probably thinks he has been successfully training us instead. Since he is a younger rat, it was necessary for Apollo to be well socialized and used to interacting with us. He was not receptive at first, but very quickly after became used to us and his environment. One particular issue in the beginning was his insistence on squeaking when we made contact with him or tried to pick him up. It was important to maintain authority over him, letting him know that his squeaking wasn’t going to allow him to have his way. As a result, the squeaking decreased significantly with more and more contact. Apollo demonstrated his talents early by being the first rat in the class to be able to climb in his box. Regardless of where we placed him or the box on the table, he was consistently able to find the box and climb in. Apollo’s box has become his place of comfort so we utilized the …show more content…
The ultimate goal was to shape Apollo into pressing the lever inside the box to receive pellets. This requires the reinforcement of exact segments of behavior across successive trials towards the desired target behavior (Powell et al., 2013). In order to accomplish this, it was first necessary for us to place Apollo on a fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement. This is an area we have struggled tremendously. Ideally, Apollo would have a high rate of response (eating the pellets) with a short post-reinforcement pause following the attainment of each reinforcer, however, he has not quite had a high rate of response. While he has improved with each day, he has yet to continue eating the pellets after each pause. This was consistent when the environment was changed (lights turned off) and when the attraction to the pellets was increased (addition of human