Shaping (Day 1-4)

To shape Jolene it took me 4 days total which was 120 minutes. How I got Jolene to be shaped was first Whenever Jolene went to the back side of the Operant Box I would reward her. I did this until she was spending most of her time in the back of the box and not the front. I would reward her every time she would look at the lever after I got Jolene to look at the lever I would reward her when she was extremely close to the lever and example would be if she would sniff the lever she would get a reward. After I got Jolene sniffing the lever I started to only give her a reward if she would put a hand on the lever I started to give a reward if she only had one hand on the lever. she achieved this goal very well and was sometimes hitting the lever with only one hand. She would put her nose under the bar with one hand during this time even though she had one hand over the bar I would only reward her if she had one hand and her nose over the bar and this was somewhat difficult. When we over came that problem the next was putting two hands over the bar and that was not that difficult, because she started to learn the best way to get a reward was to do the proper technique. So she started to stop putting her nose under the bar. overall there were difficult parts to shaping but Jolene slowly learned the only way she was going to get rewarded was to properly hit the lever and by the end of day 4 Jolene had 197 lever hits I was confident that if I put her on FR2 she would do just fine. I believe that Jolene's Shaping was just like the book because the number of error's lowered, the speed changed, and the intensity of the right behavior increased.