Making the Connection: Behavior Chains

During the first season of ClickerExpo, it seemed to me that a lot of people had questions about behavior chains and back-chaining. I'd like to shed a little light on the subject. A behavior chain is an event in which units of behavior occur in sequences and are linked together by learned cues. Back-chaining, which means teaching those units in reverse order and reinforcing each unit with the cue for the next, is a training technique. We use this technique to take advantage of the intrinsic nature of the event.