PSICOLOGIA & INFORMÁTICA - BVS Psicologia ULAPSI Brasil

cumulative records with different scales so that you could show bothlocal details and the overall performance. And, they could graph differentbehaviors than the bar press as well. One group graphed adecline in approach to the water reservoir, for example, as the ratbecame satiated.Now, not everything was easy all the time. Some of the studentshad a hard time getting started because they hadn’t installed theprogram correctly. The technical support person helped, however, andall that got straightened out. I also had a couple of the more computersavy students help the others who had problems getting started. Sooneverybody was working well on their own. And, it wasn’t just the students— two times the CyberRat servers did not function for a wholeday. I had to contact Roger Ray, the developer, and let him know therewas a problem. He returned my email that same day. Seems that electricalstorms caused some problems. None of the data were lost, however.The next day all was well again. And, I could send a message to allthe students that they got when they signed onto CyberRat the nexttime to say what our new deadlines were.Oh, here’s a good thing about CyberRat and problems. Twoof the students actually ran the wrong conditions in their experiment.One time I discovered the problem because the data just didn’t lookright. The other time the student said something in class that showedthere was a problem. Each time, however, we could just “start over”with a different rat and they got to do it right the second time. Thatwould have been difficult if we had been working with live rats. Iliked the way I could access the entire history of training for all therats being used. I could see what conditions were run, for how long,and what the data looked like. Easy to do right from home, actually.What I liked best of all, however, was that the students generatedso many ideas for additional research studies. And, some ofthem will do these studies with real rats next semester. I always emphasizedthat CyberRat was a good simulation but that real researchneeds to be done with live rats. I think they got the point.DESIGNER PERSPECTIVECyberRat is really over an hour of video taken from four juvenile,female, albino rats as they moved around a Skinner box. There areapproximately 1800 video clips in all. Some of these clips last just a182 | PSICOLOGIA & INFORMÁTICA