Magazine Training: Day 1

This morning, I met with Dr. Trench to put Lil' Swanson in the operant box for the first time. For those of you who don't know, the operant box was created by Dr. Skinner, and is a box with one clear wall, adjacent to which is a wall with a food magazine (or hopper--just a little tray that food pellets are dropped into from outside the box), a light, and a lever. Whenever the lever is pressed, a food pellet drops into the magazine, the light turns on, and there is a small noise. The operator of the operant box can also trigger these events by pressing a button.

Ultimately, my goal is to teach Swanson to press a bar. Before I can begin shaping her to perform that behavior, though, there are a few things I have to do first--namely, magazine train her. When training an animal (or human, I suppose) using operant conditioning, desired behaviors are encouraged by presenting the organism with a reinforcement when that behavior is performed. Reinforcement works best when it is delivered without delay. While I will be using food as a reinforcement, it would be difficult to feed Swanson a pellet from the magazine immediately after she performs the desired behavior (because she may not necessarily realize that a food pellet has been dropped into the magazine, or because it may take her a few seconds to walk over to the magazine to eat her reward). Magazine training allows me to avoid this problem. Magazine training is simply training the organism (in my case, Lil' Swanson) to associate a reward (food pellets) with another stimulus (the noise and the light turning on). This way, Swanson will learn that when she hears a certain noise, there is food waiting for her, and that noise can be made the instant she performs a desired behavior. 

So Dr. Trench and I began the first step-magazine training. Whenever Swanson was facing the food hopper, I pressed the button to make a pellet drop into the hopper (and make a noise and turn the light on). After she ate that one and backed away, still facing the hopper, I pressed the button again. And again. After feeding Swanson about 50 food pellets, she finally got the hang of associating food with the light and noise--even when she wandered away from the food hopper, she'd turn around as soon as she heard the noise of a treat being dropped down into it, then go eat the treat. See the video below to watch this in action :)

Notice how Swanson has learned to associate the sound with food being delivered--even though Swanson is facing away from the food hopper, she knows that there is a pellet waiting for her as soon as she hears the sound, and runs over to eat it. Success! All in all, this process took 19 minutes, and went how I expected based on our class discussions--pairing the food (the primary reinforcer) with the noise and light (conditioned reinforcer) over and over caused Swanson to associate the noise and light with food.