Sniffy: The Virtual Rat also known as Sniffy Pro and Sniffy Pro for Windows is a suite of computer software used for teaching the psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 of learning

Learning

Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...

 which simulates a rat in an operant box and can be used to run experiments and classical conditioning

Classical conditioning

Classical conditioning is a form of conditioning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov...

 and operant conditioning

Operant conditioning

Operant conditioning is a form of psychological learning during which an individual modifies the occurrence and form of its own behavior due to the association of the behavior with a stimulus...

.

It is designed as an alternative to teaching psychology of learning using real rats, which can be prohibitively expensive or may be considered unethically cruel towards animals.

Some general advantages and limitations of Sniffy noted by Jukabow (2007) are listed below:

Advantages:

• It can simulate several classical conditioning topics that are covered in introductory courses such as: acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, stimulus-intensity effects, compound conditioning, blocking, overshadowing, overexpectation, inhibition, sensory preconditioning, higher-order-conditioning, sensitization, and background conditioning.
• It can simulate many of the operant conditioning topics covered in introductory courses such as: magazine training, reinforcement, punishment, secondary reinforcement, simple operant schedules, and discrimination.
• It is not as expensive as maintaining a live animal lab.
• It is more time effective than an animal lab. Students can be given the software and do the projects on their own time rather than during scheduled lab hours.

Limitations:

• The "mind window" function of the program. This allows the students to see into the rats mind to understand what is going on. Most of the procedures covered by this program are behavioral experiments. Getting an undergraduate to stop using terms like mind and think from a more scientific perspective is hard enough without the learning aids confounding the process.
• The data produced from each rat is typically the same which makes the program useless for any between subject projects.
• The speed of a behavior's reacquisition is identical to its original acquisition speed which is not the case in real animals.
• A lever press will spontaneously be acquired if you do nothing to shape it which sort of defeats the purpose of most labs that would consider using this program.
• Some see the fact that it is a program which can be turned on an off as a problem in and of itself. Technically if the student is messing up they can just start over. Starting over when making mistakes with real subjects is not as simple.