Choices

“They figure out the marker pretty quickly, but they don’t necessarily want to be touched. So that’s another long process, getting them used to rubbing against your hand or something. A lot of times they can be comfortable touching you, but they don’t want you to touch them.”

There are some fabulous quotes in this interview and I especially love this one. Working with animals that have been abused, or are afraid of many things, this is a concept that is critical. This concept is what starts the teaching process where the learner begins to understand they can have control over their environment. And control is one of the biggest reinforcers we can give them.

An Interview with Tara Gifford

Treatless Clicks

Working through lots of reading material this week lots of things really started to fall in to place and although able to describe what happens with treatless clicks it has now taken on a whole new meaning. So here goes…..

As I understand it treatless clicks are intended to put the behaviour on a variable ratio of reinforcement. The idea being that this makes the behaviour more resistant to extinction (the reduction in frequency, or total loss, of a behaviour due to total withdrawal of reinforcement for the behaviour). Its intended to make the behaviour stay for a long time, if not forever.

In this approach to training, initially the click is contingently paired with the +Rer in use (the click means a +Rer is coming) each time there is a click. The click becomes a conditioned reinforcer (CR) which has been contingently paired with an unconditioned reinforcer (UR). Note; the click is not paired with the behaviour, its paired with the UR.

Then this continuous ratio (1:1) of click to +Rer changes to; every now and then when there is a click (CR) there is a +Rer (UR). However, because the contingent relationship is between the CR and the UR this means each time there is a click the behaviour IS being reinforced….so its not a variable ratio of reinforcement.

Over a period of time the presentation of the CR no longer has a reliable (contingent) relationship with the UR and so the relationship between click and +Rer gets damaged or broken (its no longer the consistent marker that +Rment will follow) and the learner will find something else that is a more reliable marker.

The click will stop acting as a CR and the behaviour is just as susceptible to extinction as it wasn’t put on a variable ratio f reinforcement (until the relationship between the CR and UR began to break down).

If we want to strengthen a behaviour against extinction then the most effective way to do this is to have a 1:1 CR-UR relationship at all times and build a long and strong reinforcement history with that 1:1 relationship. A behaviour that is more resistant to extinction is created from an increase in number, magnitude and quality of +Rment given.

Reinforc-er, -ment-, -ing

Reinforcing/Punishing (adjective) – the property of a stimulus.

Note; this is not reinforcer/punisher (noun), which describes the intent of the consequence used.

My interpretation; It is not describing what the consequence is, its describing the property (or effect) it has in that set of circumstances (internal environment of the learner as well as external environment).

If the behaviour did not decrease in some way (duration, frequency etc) then the consequence did not have punishing properties for the target behaviour. If the behaviour did not increase in some way (duration, frequency etc) then the consequence did not have reinforcing properties for the target behaviour.

What makes a reinforcer reinforcing?

….given a persons individual history and current motivational state, and the environmental conditions, “any stimulus change can be a ‘reinforcer’ if the characteristics of the change and the temporal relation of the change to the response under observation are properly selected”, Schoenfeld, 1995).

In other words, whether something is reinforcing/punishing depends on many variables. It is not a given that something will be reinforcing/punishing to a learner all the time.

The words reinforcer and punisher indicate a functional relationship, not the consequence itself.

A Positive Reinforcer for afters

“….positive reinforcers are not defined with terms such as pleasant or satisfying, aversive stimuli should not be defined with terms such as annoying or unpleasant. The terms reinforce and punisher should not be used on the basis of a stimulus event’s assumed effect on behaviour or on any inherent property of the stimulus event itself.”
Cooper et al.

In other words, reinforcer and punisher simply describe if a behaviour increases as a result of the consequence or decreases as a result of the consequence. They have no bearing on whether the consequence was good or bad, liked or disliked.

Stimulus Control, poor stimulus control and Intelligent Disobedience

Stimulus Control, poor stimulus control and Intelligent Disobedience;

When I started to write this is seemed like a simple explanation, but it has morphed in to a version of War and Peace!…….

One of the aims of training is to have a behaviour under stimulus control. However, since each behaviour is learned through a set of cues (stimuli, more accurately; discriminative stimuli) then what the learner is really learning is a stimulus class that cues a reinforce/punisher is available should the learner perform behaviour X.

But every now and then a behavior is not performed when the discriminative stimulus(i) is/are presented the learner performs the wrong behaviour, or does nothing.

Depending on the circumstances I have heard this called poor stimulus control of a behaviour or intelligent disobedience. It would be called poor stimulus control if the learner is thought to just not know what behaviour that set of stimuli are cueing, and it would be called intelligent disobedience if the learner is thought to do something else (or do nothing) because there would be a good reason not to do the behaviour.

When we deem this poor stimulus control we tend to lay responsibility on the learner. The learner did not understand the cues (stimuli). But what if the trainer did not present the cues consistently and clearly enough for the learner to understand that they were all the same cue. The learner may have responded to the cue when it looked like V but when the trainer presented what they thought was the same cue and it looked more like W then the learner might get confused. Or yesterday when the learner responded to the cue correctly and today they did not because we have not noticed that the black bucket that was in the training space yesterday is not there today. Unwittingly, the black bucket was learned as part of the environmental stimuli and without one of the stimuli the others combined no longer work function in the way we thought they did.

Although we present one cue that we intend to prompt a behaviour the learner may learn a number of cues combined. Without one part of the combination the behaviour will not be prompted. I often see people offering a cue to their learner saying “this is the cue” but in reality when looking closely the learner has picked out something else, something more meaningful or that has been more consistent throughout the learning process as the cue.

In addition, it is usually very hard, if not impossible, for us to present a cue in the same way every time. As such we are really hoping that the learner will learn a stimulus class (a class of stimuli that all prompt the same behaviour). Just the same as no behaviour carried out will look the same, each attempt will have a slightly different topography and so it is a response class.

Intelligent Disobedience; the learner always performs a behaviour ‘on cue’, the behaviour is under stimulus control. Then one day they do not perform the behaviour and not performing was deemed to be the right answer, e.g.guide dog always crosses the road but today did not because there was a car coming, this is often called intelligent disobedience in response to the cue (stimulus). However, if we look at this situation, this is not being disobedient, this is responding to the cues in the environment which were different. There are only reinforcers available if X, Y and Z are presented, but today X, Y, Z and A were all presented therefore the behaviour is still under stimulus control as the behaviour did not occur when a different set of stimuli were presented.

Or if we ask a horse to back up and they always do, but today they didn’t. If we look closely we will see one or more antecedent stimuli that indicted backing was not the appropriate response.

Habitutation

Habituation.
Updated; Where the repeated (note; not continuous) presentation of a stimulus that results in e.g. a startle response, gradually no longer elicits a startle response.

We often unwittingly rely on habituation and it works….until the stimulus is no longer presented frequently. Habituation is not permanent and so the reaction to the stimulus can return after no or delayed exposure to the stimulus.

Extinction – Resurgence

Great article, for many reasons; Read the article

Your dog/horse/cat/learner may be very capable of responding to various cues for various behaviours in various settings, but the day they say, “no”, we have to stop and listen. They are not being disobedient, they are communicating, e.g. I don’t feel safe enough, for dogs in a sit it may be that they are being asked to sit in a puddle, for horses being asked to back it may be that there is another horse right behind (in a stable) and although we know they are safe to a horse backing towards another horse is threatening behaviour, a dog being asked to sit while another sniffs all around….and so on.

Some of the behaviours above, for me, fall in to the category of; just because we can train it doesn’t mean we should. Or, when the dog does not sit we force them in to a sit. What that communicates is; you have no choice. Ethics plays a role in “just because we can….”.

They may offer another behaviour instead. They will offer previously learned behaviours as a way of saying, “I can’t do THAT right now but yesterday you loved THIS so how about THIS instead”. Communication, not disobedience.

Regression; when the learner goes through previously reinforced behaviours in reverse chronological order (you try what worked the last time, then go back to the version before that etc).

Extinction; behaviours previously reinforced are not longer reinforced and the frequency of the behaviour decreases. The behaviour can never be completely extinguished and can resurge, or spontaneously recover (also called extinction burst), when the environmental events are such that the behaviour is cued.

Extinction/resurgence can be useful in training of done on a micro level.

The Language of Learning and Behaviour

“The Language of Learning and Behaviour; From the start we must face the fact that we won’t be able to define learning. There are no satisfactory definitions……

….Our main concern will be to show how learning works. What are the conditions under which organisms learn and what happens when they do so?”

I like this section I have transcribed above. The book is called Learning (A. Charles Catania). The reason I like this is it is a lovely reminder that nomenclature matters.

We talk so much about teaching behaviours to our animals (learners). We call them learners, but we talk about teaching them. Nomenclature matters! If we change our words to talk about our animals learning from us rather than us teaching them does it change how we feel about and react towards our learners? I know when I change to thinking about my learner learning instead of me teaching my learner it definitely changes how I feel about the situation.

We all know what it feels like to learn. Not many of us are comfortable with being teachers. Who wants to stand in front of a room full of people and teach? Not many of us feel we have sufficient knowledge and not many of us have the confidence for standing in front of a room full of people and sharing what knowledge we have. It can be a terrifying thought; what if we are asked a question we don’t know the answer to!?. So not many of us know what it feels like to be teachers, but we are ALL learners.

Learning can be a stressful business. So when we think about our learners learning it prompts empathy for them because we have experienced being in that position all our lives. We know how challenging it can be, we have all experienced good and not so good teachers, someone who said things in a way that made perfect sense and others who were teaching the same thing but seemed to be talking a different language. Thinking of teaching from the perspective of the learner learning from us seems like a subtle but significant point.

A nice way to think about a teacher; someone who knows more on the subject matter than the learner. Our teacher may know a LOT more or just a little more, but we still learn from them because they know more than us.

The only person who can change you is YOU

Going through my notes from the Cavalia clinic I was reminded of a wonderful discussion that was had. It starts with the comment; “the only person who can change you is you” is not true.

We are all part of each others environment which means we are all acting as antecedents in one way or another. We are all part of the antecedent environment. So if we want to change we need to alter the antecedent environment.

This also means we have a huge responsibility for each others happiness. And what a poignant place to be sharing this…and environment where bullying and trolls are rife. We can all impact someone elses happiness, for better or for worse. we can impact others lives, for better or for worse.

I am very lucky to be part of, and sharing in, some facebook groups just now where the members are all creating positive responses [behaviours] from the other participating members. We are all sharing knowledge that is helping to improve each others lives.