The first trick to dealing with this study is to look at the data. Just take a couple minutes and take a peak at the data sheet. What do you see?
You've got some row headings of Phase I, Phase II, and Phase III. This should give you the idea that you'll be looking for some sort of change across time or across conditions.
The column headers tell you thta you've got six rats in the study. You've got four rats on the extinction protocol and two on the reinforcement protocol. So, maybe we should think about looking for differences between the extinction and reinforcement conditions. What else? Well, of the four rats on extinction, two had the light as the CS+ (rats 1 and 3) and two had the tone as the CS+ (rats 6 and 8). What could we do with this? How about looking for any differences between light and tone as a stimulus? Perhaps there is a difference in saliency between the stimuli. If so, then it could be that one of the stimuli will extinguish quicker, or more completely, than the other. What about doing something similar for those rats that were on reinforcement but had different a different stimulus as their CS+? Well...this probably isn't necessary or very productive. Why? A couple of reasons. First, by this point the rat will probably be pretty strongly conditioned to respond to its CS+. Therefore, it is unlikely that you'd see any big differences between the light and the tone during this experiment. Second, because of the reinforcement there was no reason for the rats' behaviour to change during the course of Phase II.
Is there anything else we can look at here? Yes. How about the differences between a rat's responding to a first order trial in Phase I and Phase II? We should probably look at this for both extinction and reinforcement rats.
Additionally, this was an experiment in second order conditioning. We should check to see what happened with the second order conditioned stimulus. How might we do that? Well...how about using the last four second order trials of Phase I and comparing them to the four trials of Phase III (i.e., the test trials). (During Phase III you tested to see if responding to the second order stimulus had been extinguished.)
Ok, we've got a start on some of the types of questions you can ask about this data. And notice, we've done all this without actually looking at the actual data itself!
Here are some of the questions you might be considering:
Now, as a last point, before Thursday/Friday think about how you could combine data within groups. To remind you, there are two main groups: extinction and reinforcement. Within extinction there are two groups: light and tone. By putting the data into groups it is going to be easier to work with it. Take a few minutes to think about how you can combine the data to make groups of data, keeping in mind the questions that you're going to be investigating.