If you are new to clicker training, first search this site for information about "conditioning the clicker." Once you've done that, here's how you will soon be able to actually USE your clicker. I click with my tongue, which sounds exactly like a handheld clicker, and I condition it exactly the same way. A trainer chooses a piece of behavior or "criteria" that he is going to mark (make conscious) and reinforce. Maybe picture a dog "bow." Think of it like taking a picture with a camera. If the dog stretches and bows all at once, fine, the trainer can click and feed the dog. Or maybe the trainer chooses just a piece of the whole behavioral picture, maybe she starts to mark (click and treat) each time the dog lowers his head. The piece of behavior that the trainer is focused on is called the "criteria." Each time the dog offers us a piece of behavior, and like a real artist, we select the piece we will mark and reinforce. So, no matter what happens after the click, the dog will be reinforced. I would use food to reinforce this bow. Keep the food in a little pile on the kitchen table, so you can grab a piece after you click, but the dog can't see it. So the dog is lowering his head, click and treat! The dog repeats the behavior, and if you just wait an extra second after he's lowered his head, he'll lower it further. Click and treat! Pretty soon, he'll drop down to a bow. Click and treat! The next day, you wake up in the morning, and your dog gives you a bow (hoping to earn a click and treat). Give him the prize! Now, you can start putting it on cue. So the "click" is a conditioned marker signaling reinforcement. You just used it to shape behavior. Dogs follow the click like it's a bouncing ball, or a geiger counter detecting gold. But the click isn't quite reinforcement in itself. It's more like money. You can't eat or drink money, and if you couldn't buy anything with money, money would be worthless. Same with the click: you always need to deliver something the dog wants right after the click. A click is not a cue. A cue stimulates behavior, a click just marks it. So, when I hear a certain piece of music, I know Survivor is on TV. The music is my cue to drop my book and run downstairs to watch. So, once the dog knows that this bowing behavior is a winning one, we can start to associate that behavior with some sort of cue. If everytime right before your dog sat, you said "hokus pokus" and then the dog sat, and you reinforced that, soon you could say "hocus pokus" and the dog would sit. Some people are really good at coming up with funny cues for canine behavior. A cue could be a word, or body language, or a phone ringing. It could be a song, or an object . I've read that some people show the dog a plastic flower every time the dog goes pee, and soon they can show the dog the flower as a cue to pee. Example: For the bow behavior, I say "ta da" and hold my hand on my stomach and bow slightly. It's much easier for a dog to read body language, so when I start, I often use both body language and verbal signal, and eventually I can fade the body language and just use the word. So, once the dog is offering all this bow behavior, and you are clicking and feeding him for offering it, you start giving your cue right as the dog bowing. At this point, I also try to feed the dog in the bow position, toss the treat down between the paws, or reach and click and treat several times while the dog is in that position. Then I give a release cue "okay" and toss a treat the dog has to run to get. I want my dog to learn that any cued behavior is reinforceable until the fat lady sings. I don't want the dog to think she needs to stand up in order to get reinforced. Clicking and reinforcing in position is very powerful. So, a click is an indicator. It points out the relationship between the behavior and the reinforcement. It says "hey, this sit is earning you this treat!" Because a click is always immediately followed by reinforcement, the click not only marks behavior, it also points out things that the dog can earn. In this way it really makes dogs more responsible for their behavior. But reinforcement is also an indicator, and whenever possible, you want to reinforce the dog while he is still doing the cued behavior. So as time goes by and you give your dog a well rounded education (haha) the primary marker signal (click)helps the animals makes intelligent behavioral choices. It's a powerful indicator, strongly associated with reinforcement. It helps animals "identify" the behavior that wins prizes, but it doesn't intentionally begin or end behaviors. Cues begin and end behaviors. Example: Karen Pryor has an example here of teaching shelter dogs to stop barking. She passes by a dog, it's not barking, she clicks and treats. STILL not barking? She clicks and treats again. This is an example where the click and treat did not interrupt nor end the targeted behavior. The click marked a behavioral picture and the dog figures that out. We just want the dog to notice what it was doing when s/he heard the click. As Pamela Reid, Ph.D. writes in a current issue of Clean Run magazine (article is titled "Clicker Complexities, part 2") "clicker training is relatively new to dog training, and tradition and legend govern many users, rather than real science." One legend that holds clicker trainers back is misunderstanding of the saying, "The click ends the behavior." Some are so stuck on that idea that they tend to feel that if my click DOESN'T end the behavior, then my click must be a keep going signal. But, as Pamela Reid writes, "our dogs are capable of learning hugely complex associations provided we capitalize on their abilities." In other words, maybe for a goldfish, where we often condition them to flashlight cues, the simplest approach might be to just leave the light on and shut it off to begin, mark for reinforcement, and end behaviors. But dogs have an entirely different "thinking" ability, and we can teach them to exploit it. About the author:
