FR 1 and 2 in ONE Training Session

In operant conditioning, a fixed ratio is a schedule of reinforcements in which a behavior is reinforced only after a certain number of responses. The first day Princess Fiona Buttercup, or Fi-B for short, was put on an FR 1 schedule starting at 3:33 pm. This means that for every push of the lever, she received one food pellet as reinforcement.

Once in the operant box, Fi-B took less than 15 seconds to recall the shaping we did the day before. She immediately pushed the lever and had 19 presses in 1 minute. It was another proud parent moment!
Although she took some brief periods to groom and sniff around, my partner, EP, and I decided to move straight to FR 2 that day. We stopped the FR 1 schedule after 6 minutes and 29 seconds. She had 83 pushes and 52 reinforcements.

(This is the cumulative record for our FR1 schedule.) 

For an FR 2 schedule, Fi-B had to press the lever twice in order to receive a reinforcement. By 7 minutes and 30 seconds, she had pushed the lever 116 times. EP also gave her quite a bit of verbal reinforcement, or what she likes to call her pageant mom talk. After 12 minutes and 20 seconds, we recorded 147 pushes. I predict there were so few pushes because she appeared to get bored at times. As always, there were periods of grooming and walking around. Although she didn't seem to quite catch on to the 2 pushes/1 reinforcement concept, I was still a proud parent. The graphs below show our progress from FR 1 and 2, respectively. On the bottom graph, you can see around the 8 minute mark that she did indeed get a bit bored as our graph line is less steep. At the end of the training session, Fi-B had 190 bar pushes for 78 reinforcements.

(This is the cumulative record for our FR2 schedule.)

The tick marks on the graphs indicate when Fi-B pushed the bar. For FR 1, we stopped after approximately 6 minutes as Fi-B quickly learned the behavior and moved on to FR 2.