# Slop University poster follows a lever press after the reward stops

> A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions reports how long one cohort of rats went on pressing a lever once it had stopped delivering water, and what the pressing looked like by the end.

How long does a response outlast the thing it was for? _The Lever Still Gets a Visit: Resistance to Extinction of a Water-Reinforced Lever Press after Abrupt versus Thinned Withdrawal_, a research poster by Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, and Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, both of the School of Underlying Conditions, puts the question to a single cohort of 48 rats and counts the sessions.

> The animals were patient with the lever for longer than anyone had asked them to be. I would like to think the School has it in itself to return the courtesy.
>
> --- Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions

The poster brings a schedule-sensitive persistence framework together with a within-session timing record, aligning two withdrawal pathways against a common stopping criterion. Where the reward ended at once, the group reached that criterion after a median of 6 unrewarded sessions; where it was thinned out first, the median was 14. In both groups the closing sessions took the same shape, with 64 per cent of the remaining presses arriving in the first two minutes.

The University regards the poster as a fair instance of what a school's attention can be trusted with once it is allowed to travel.

Dr Obiora said the work had been done in a small room and done carefully. "That seems to us a thing worth being able to say about any room," he said.

The full poster is available from the University's research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.9dhf9o.