Lever pressing task

Skilled motor control has been evaluated in tests of manipulative ability, such as a paw reaching for food, in tests of lever pressing, and in simple and choice reaction time tasks in operant test apparatuses. 

There are several operant tasks that offer the opportunity to separate an animal s learning from its performance of a known task. Repeated acquisition is such a task and requires the animal to learn a new sequence of lever presses each session. The learning baseline may be more sensitive to disruption by a toxicant than the performance of an already acquired sequence. 

One of the most popular tests used to measure anxiety in animals are operant conflict tests. The word operant means that the subject, whether animal or human, must perform some task to bring about a specific result. In this kind of test, something that the animal likes or needs (such as food or water) is used as positive reinforcement to teach the animal to perform a task. For example, a rat might learn that pressing a lever brings the delivery of a food pellet. In this case, pressing the lever is the operant behavior and the food pellet is... 

In an autoshaping task, rats are trained in an operant box where a right or left lever is presented and if the animal presses the lever, the lever is retracted... 

A backhoe is essentially a mechanical arm that is under the control of an operator. To control this mechanical arm the operator uses both aims, both feet, both eyes, and all his or her concentration (Fig. 32.1). The driver uses both arms to pull levers, both feet to press pedals to operate the arm, and both eyes to monitor the task being performed by the digger—all this to control a single mechanical arm. Now consider a person with amputations of both arms above the elbow and one begins to have some appreciation of the task such a limbless person faces in controlling an artificial (prosthetic) arm or arms. 

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