Sniffy The Virtual Rat Pro Version 3.0 Free Download

[Elwanda Menhennett]

JeffGraham (Dr. Jeff) is a cognitive psychologist with interests in computer-assisted instruction, neural network modeling, and health psychology. He received his M.A. from the University of Western Ontario and his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo. As an Associate Professor at the University of Otago (Dunedin, New Zealand) Jeff developed connectionist models of children's arithmetic and studied an accelerated learning curriculum for early childhood mathematics. Since 1988 Jeff has used computers to teach psychology. With the help of many student volunteers Jeff and his colleagues have developed educational software projects like Sniffy, the Virtual Rat, a simulation of behavioural concepts in learning, and DeckChair Tutor, an online learning toolkit for teaching, assessment, and psychology experiment hosting.

Dr. Graham was hired in 1992 to design and implement the computer-laboratory component of PSY100 - Introductory Psychology. He develops new lab exercises that make appropriate use of multimedia technologies and fill in the gaps in the topics covered during lectures.

Dr. Graham (and the Psychology Club) offer sessions for students and friends to learn a relaxation technique that calms the mind, releases stress, and opens a door to our unconscious sources of creativity. The meditation routine is a combination of "progressive relaxation" taught at Harvard by Herbert Benson as the "the relaxation response" and more ancient techniques used by mystics in many different religions.

Click here to listen to a 15 minute session (with stream sounds)

Click here to listen to a 20 minute session (with ocean waves)

Click here to listen to a 11 minute intro session (with vocal only)

With 84 computers in the Deerfield Hall computer lab we schedule 18 lab sections to handle 1500 students enrolled in PSY100. We have 2.7 Ghz Intel Core i5 iMac computers for our student workstations. Each machine has 8 GB of RAM and a 999 GB hard drive, and a high-speed CD-ROM superdrive. These machines make internet browsing and complex computations very quick and easy.

Sniffy the Virtual Rat has been a valuable tool for Psychology, Animal Studies, and Independent Study courses since 1995, enabling students to simulate and experience operant and classical conditioning of a rat in an experimental setting.

Sniffy the Virtual Rat gives educators the opportunity to offer a virtual behavioural laboratory experience without the need to use live animals and allows students to learn how to design, run, and conduct rigorous scientific experiments.

Sniffy the Virtual Rat Version 4.0 is now available on both the Apple and Microsoft App Stores. Educators interested in continuing to use or introduce Sniffy into their curriculum now have an easy way for students to acquire software for their own computers. A free trial version is available for download today.

More details are available at www.sniffythevirtualrat.com.

"Sniffy" is a computer program designed for students who do not want to get personal with the yellow-toothed creatures and college administrators who do not want the hassle and expense of caring for the living, breathing animals.

Rats placed in controlled environments, like the Skinner Box, named for inventor B.F. Skinner, teach students concepts like operant conditioning. The operant conditioning experiment in the Skinner Box suggests that animals and people learn certain behaviors through a system of reward and punishment. "Sniffy" is designed to mimic a real rat in a Skinner Box.

To create "Sniffy," professors and researchers studied rat movements, noting every scratch and sniff. They calculated that a live rat has about 80 individual moves. About 30 of the rat's signature moves were used for "Sniffy."

Next, the team that built "Sniffy" had to analyze how a rat learns, and then supply the program with artificial rat intelligence. After several months of deconstructing rat intelligence, they were able to devise a trainable electronic rodent.

In the classroom, teams of students attempt to teach "Sniffy" to exhibit a certain behavior and then eat cheese as a reward. It generally takes novice rat trainers between 40 minutes and an hour to get the virtual rat doing what they want. (723K QuickTime movie)

But the virtual rat's creators are already working on a more realistic version. Developers are videotaping images of real rats and pasting them into the virtual world as the embodiment of the experimental rat.

I did three separate training sessions with Sniffy the virtual rat. The first was the magazine training. This training session took about 40 minutes to complete. In order to magazine train sniffy, I had to click the bar to make the food fall into the magazine. At first, the rat would just be wandering around the box and rearing up on its hind legs occasionally until it noticed the food. After it discovered the food more and more, it would respond to the reinforcement of food more quickly.

The second training session I did was shaping. This session took about an hour and a half for me. It was very frustrating because the program would not say the rat was officially trained until the sound of food and the bar sound and the action strength were all maxed out. At the beginning of the training session, I had to watch Sniffy closely so that I clicked the bar when it was reared up near the bar. However, as his association grew stronger, Sniffy began to press the bar more on his own, so I was doing more watching and less pressing myself eventually. This made the activity very boring to me. I sat and watched Sniffy press the bar for 30 minutes on his own, but it took that many presses for the program to finally confirm that Sniffy was shaped. I do feel better prepared to train a live rat; however, I feel like a live rat will require a much more fine-tuned window of time for when a reinforcement needs to be given during the shaping process. Also, I hope the live rat has more concentration than Sniffy because the virtual rat seemed to wander alot.

The last training session I did with Sniffy was an FR3 schedule. In this schedule, Sniffy had to press the bar 3 times in order to get a food pellet. By the time I got to this schedule, I was so frustrated from the shaping schedule that I used the speed-up process the program offers to speed up the cumulative record and time in the program. Basically, Sniffy was trained on an FR3 schedule in about a minute. One change that I noticed going from shaping to FR3 was that the cumulative record line had a much steeper slope in the FR3 schedule than in the shaping one. This means that Sniffy was pressing the bar much more often when on the FR3 schedule than during the FR1 shaping schedule.

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