Download Sniffy The Virtual Rat
Siri Vonbank
Sniffy is an affordable and humane way to give students hands-on access to the main phenomena of classical and operant conditioning that courses on the psychology of learning typically discuss. Although psychologists believe that the phenomena that the Sniffy program simulates play a prominent role in both human and animal behaviour, courses that discuss these topics are usually taught in a lecture format that gives students no chance to obtain laboratory experience. Sniffy changes all that giving students a virtual research lab to actually experience what they could only read about before.
Using a conditioned emotional response (CER) method, the program simulates a wide variety of Pavlovian conditioning principles along with several procedures. These principles and procedures include acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, CS and US intensity effects, blocking, overshadowing, overexpectation, inhibition, sensory preconditioning, higher-order conditioning, and background (context) conditioning. The user also may modify each of these procedures in various ways to examine different types of effects (e.g., changing the CS intensity during a blocking experiment). These many possible simulations can easily fill a semester with virtual experiments.
Chapter 2 contains a section on the CER procedure. The authors briefly discuss calculation of the suppression ratio and movement ratios (i.e., freezing) when bar pressing is not the dependent measure. When conducting these demonstrations, however, the software only programs for low, medium, or high intensity shocks instead of allowing the user to choose a virtual shock value in milliamperes. Moreover, the virtual rat responds in three categorically different ways depending on shock intensity (habituation to low intensity, sensitization to high intensity and neither habituation nor sensitization to medium intensity stimuli) rather than showing a range of behavioral variations.
The operant conditioning sections of Sniffy the Virtual Rat automatically produce cumulative recordings of the virtual rat's responding. Cumulative records certainly have their place in operant analyses despite their nearly complete disappearance from the experimental literature. The program, however, unfortunately exports these data as a long string of garbage characters. Allowing for off-line analyses of these cumulative recordings would significantly increase the software's educational value. Moreover, a simple bar-press counter that shows a running tally of responding would enhance the program as well.
Chapter 10 also contains a behavioral-repertoire observation exercise that helps students develop observational skills. In two conditions, one with a bar-press-trained virtual rat and another with an untrained virtual rat, a student may record the frequency of each of its eight responses (paw lifting, face touching, head lowering, sniffing, locomotion, bar pressing, eating, and drinking). This exercise can help teach observation techniques and allow comparisons of behavior change between a control and experimental virtual rat. Apart from simple frequency counts, students may use different observation techniques, such as whole or partial time sampling, while watching the same computer screen. This exercise can reveal how observation techniques influence interobserver reliability measures.
Another function of Sniffy the Virtual Rat that I particularly like is that the virtual rat will acquire bar pressing if left alone in the experimental chamber. The rate at which this occurs (as seen under the accelerated time function) can be compared to the time it takes for another virtual rat to acquire the same behavior after having been exposed to a magazine training procedure. I believe that such exercises can provide valuable homework assignments and fruitful discussion in the classroom.
The program is less extensive in operant conditioning simulations. Included are magazine training, reinforcement, punishment, secondary reinforcement, simple operant schedules, and discrimination. The program also allows the user to shape several different responses in the virtual rat. Files collect the data and generate graphs within the Sniffy the Virtual Rat program. Users also can access all but the cumulative record files with a text editor to obtain specific numerical information.
After conducting an experiment, one may save the generated data to text files through the Export command. In conducting my class, I expected to be able to use these files to combine data from different students to look at group functions and then to conduct statistics on those data. All students conducted the same Pavlovian experimental design on their own computer. Once the students submitted their data to the class pool, I found that the same data for all students was output for the CS and the background. I also checked this effect on my own computer and found that I generated the same data twice in a row as the students had first produced. Furthermore, this regularity of data showed up in the exported CS Response Strength text file and the exported Movement Ratio text file. Both of these files revealed the exact same data and in the same format, negating the need for both files. This regularity in the exported data, therefore, eliminated the value of pooling data across virtual rats or conducting a statistical analysis as part of a classroom project. This result also called into question whether variations in intertrial intervals are affecting the processing of data sets, as described in the previous quotation. It may be that variations in intertrial intervals do affect data output; however, if those variations are consistent across iterations and computers, then the data will not show variations in data output across virtual experiments. This issue is evident again when one tests for hysteresis effects.
Both the CS Response Strength and Movement Ratio text files contained columns of information for trial number, trial type, CS strength, background strength, and suppression ratio based upon the freezing response of the virtual rat. In contrast to the CS and background data mentioned previously, the suppression ratio data across students and across simulations revealed unique data sets. Therefore, any user of Sniffy the Virtual Rat will need to rely on the suppression ratio data when attempting to conduct group statistics. I recommend that the authors change the way the simulations operate so that each virtual rat produces a unique set of data.
The program also needs to improve its user friendliness. A more intuitive set of controls and a full screen option for the display of data and the virtual rat will improve the user's experience. Furthermore, a reduction in text devoted to nonsoftware issues would significantly reduce the size of the user manual.
With respect to the shaping simulations, it would be helpful to see output correlating the program's optimum times for virtual reinforcement and the user's actual responses. Such an upgrade will give users some feedback as to how well they shaped the behavior of the virtual rat. In addition, I suggest that the authors consider a virtual human in a vocational or educational setting. Students may use that simulation to train the virtual subject to perform more on-task behavior, at higher accuracies, etc. Such a simulation would mesh well with applied behavior analysis coursework as well as introductory conditioning courses.
Sniffy the Virtual Rat is a fun, interactive software program that gives undergraduate students a virtual laboratory experience.
Using Sniffy, students can explore by performing experiments that demonstrate most of the major conditioning phenomena discussed in textbooks on the psychology of learning.
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.
I'm a psychology student and I have to design a classic conditional experiment in sniffy and report it, but I have no ideas, I already did 5 predesigned experiments that the teacher gave me as homework too, but I don't know how to design an experiment by myself without make it look like a copy-paste of the teacher's experiments, so if you could give some ideas I'll be very thankful.
The discussion that follows in this paper uses simple experiments from the Sniffy manual to explain how operant conditioning contributes to shaping behavior. In this respect, operant conditioning provides the reference for learned behavior while the paper focuses on shaping behavior as a definite consequence of learning and behavior under the virtual rat experiment.
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