Here’s one for Throwback Thursday!
When I was in college, back in the Stone Age, I majored in
Psychology.
Honestly I thought most of what I learned was total
bullshit, except for Experimental Psychology, especially the study of animal
behavior.
For two semesters in a row, I worked with rats. I spent
endless nights in the school lab training my rats to do some pretty neat
tricks.
In one project on chained learning, I had a rat going from
station to station pressing levers, pulling chains, etc to get a food pellet at
the end.
At the end of the semester we all had to do a presentation,
showing off our rats.
One really funny thing to watch is called “Superstitious
Behavior”.
Sometimes while reinforcing a specific behavior, you
accidently reinforce a twitch or turn that inadvertently becomes part of the
overall behavior.
All of our rats had them, and we laughed out loud watching
them at the presentations.
Needless to say, I became attached to my two rats (Harry & Hugo), and instead
of seeing them turned over to the biology department, I took mine home and
built the cage you see in the picture.
They got bigger, uglier, and nasty as they matured and in
the end I was very happy that rats have a short life span.
Later,
Steve
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