Assignment 1: Adaptation, Magazine Training, Shaping, & CRF

1. Assignment 1: Adaptation, Magazine Training, Shaping, & CRF • Name

2. Apparatus Briefly describe the operant chamber and how it was divided into sections to facilitate recording of the rat's location

3. General Procedure • “A Sprague-Dawley albino rat was weighed, transported to test room, and placed in the operant chamber.” • Etc… On this slide list the procedures that was common to all test days.

4. Adaptation Phase Habituation to stimuli in a novel environment.

5. Purpose of Adaptation Phase • Novel environments tend to elicit fear or excessive exploratory behavior in rats. The adaptation phase is needed to allow the animals to habituate to the chamber. Any fear or excessive exploratory behavior that the animals display should decrease(i.e., habituate) with sufficient exposure to the operant chamber.

6. Adaptation Procedure • The rat was allowed to explore the chamber for 10 minutes. • The location of the rat was recorded every 10 seconds. (note: in your final paper you will need to explicitly state how you determined the rat’s location) • Etc.. On this slide list the procedures that were unique to this phase of the study Day 1

7. Figure 1 Example graph and text Figure 1 shows that the rat explored all areas of the lower chamber during the first 5 minutes, but by the last 3 minutes the rat remained primarily in one area of the chamber (area C). This pattern of behavior change suggests that there was habituation of exploratory behavior.

8. Magazine Training Phase • Habituation to the click of the magazine and click-food associations Continue to include slides describing the procedure and results of each of the phases of the study

9. Summary & Conclusions List the major observations and conclusions of all the training phases.