Conclusion

My favorite part about this experience was definitely working with my rat, Li'l Swanson. I was surprised by how intelligent she is and how quickly she learned to press the bar--if you had asked me a year or two ago if I thought it would be possible for me to train a rat to press a bar, I would have said no. Now, however, I realize how relatively easy it is if you just use shaping. I am now much more confident in my training abilities, and I'm really excited to get to train my friend Kelsie's dog, Kya, for my next project! I do not have any suggestions for improvement, except perhaps to give more explicit instructions for how to print/post the cumulative records off of the lab computers--it took me a while to figure that out. I don't think I began this experience with any misconceptions, other than the misconception that training a rat to press a bar would be really difficult, which I quickly learned was not the case. This project has made me realize how applicable (and fun!) the principles of learning can actually be.