At 3:07 PM +0600 6/24/99, Doug Trimble wrote:
>I took Paul's advice and successfully used CyberRat with an undergraduate
>class
>in Learning and Cognition. Somewhat to my surprise, it was mentioned on
>the last
>day of class as a highlight of the semester. Since it uses video of a
>real rat,
>the training of the rat is much more lifelike than an animated rat.
>
>I had some technical problems with it however. It gave my students
>problems when they tried to exit the program without following its
>precise procedure for exiting and saving data. A student was trying
>to read her email while her rat was being reinforced on a partial
>reinforcement schedule and the program crashed. Since she hadn't
>followed the proper exiting procedure, the program gave her
>problems the next session.
This is probably a function of the fact that the program was based on
HyperCard, which saves the whole progam in its final state at the end of
each session.
You'd probably want to have your computers offline while running CyberRat,
since any interruption would disturb the smoothness of the sequencing.
>Further, my students were unable to
>chain two behaviors. I don't know whether the program doesn't
>allow this or we were not sophisticated enough to get the rat to do
>this.
CyberRat doesn't currently support chaining or stimulus control.
I've asked that they add these functions if it's revised (I was a reviewer).
* PAUL K. BRANDON [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* Psychology Department 507-389-6217 *
* "The University formerly known as Mankato State" *
* http://www.mankato.msus.edu/dept/psych/welcome.html *
