Training Theory

I used to think of myself as standing perpetually on a bridge, with a foot in each camp. I used to expend a lot of time trying to talk psychologists into understanding or at least coming to watch what we were learning about the animals with their science. No luck. No luck in the other direction, either: the behavioral biologists were not much interested in training or reinforcement.

Barbara and I hypothesize that the clicker is a conditioned "joy" stimulus that is acquired and recognized through those same primitive pathways, which would help explain why it is so very different from, say, a human word, in its effect. If this is true, another contributing factor to the extraordinary rapidity with which the clicker and clicked behavior can be acquired might be that the click is processed by the CNS much faster than any word can be.

The olfactory power of dogs has made headlines again this month, with new research supporting our canine friends' ability to "sniff out" the presence of cancer. While these findings continue to astonish many, one aspect won't surprise fans of operant conditioning: the dogs in this study were clicker trained.

What I am going to present to you is my own case study about my golden retriever, Benjamin. It was through Ben that I met Karen Pryor and, thus, found some of the most effective ways to deal with aggression and fear-based behavior in dogs.

Humans are notoriously verbal creatures. We love to talk, and we do so automatically, even when the person we're talking to doesn't speak our language, can't hear what we're saying, or even when the "person" isn't a person at all.