Problems in Paradise

Li'l Swanson was an excellent rat. During magazine training she associated the sound with food arriving in the magazine pretty quickly, during shaping she exhibited a wide enough variety of behaviors that I was able to make progress with her during each training session, and during the various schedules of reinforcement, she made it all the way to the FR10 schedule. I really had almost no problems with her except for one, fairly insignificant behavior that I was never able to stop: Li'l Swanson constantly sniffed one particular corner (the front left corner) of the operant box, possibly because she could smell other rats that had been in the box earlier. This would not have been much of a problem (it was just sniffing, after all) except that she would sniff for minutes at a time, which would keep her from pressing the bar. I was very careful to never reward this behavior, and I was able to decrease it by cleaning out the operant box before each time I put Swanson in it. She still fixated on that spot even after I wiped down everything in the box with soap and water, but she did stay in that one corner for a shorter amount of time during each session. I do not think there is anything I could have done differently to solve the problem except maybe clean even more than I did. 

Looking back, the only way I can see myself improving from this experience is in shaping. Now that I have some experience and understand what does and does not work, I think I could now shape a rat to press a bar in a shorter amount of time than I did for this project (it took me 4 days, or about 2 hours total). I think I could be more efficient and more particular about which successive approximations of the desired behavior I would reinforce. Other than the shaping, though, I don't think there is much else I could have improved on, thanks to your instructions and having such a great rat :)