This week in ORCA we watched a really neat video of a dog learning to match objects. We often don’t think of matching as a complex skill because we are very familiar with matching and have had a lot of practice with it. However, it’s pretty complicated! Matching can also be a hard skill to teach a dog because, if you’re not careful, the dog will learn that it’s easier to watch other environmental cues (such as your body language or eye gaze) rather than actually matching the objects.
However, like many other complicated animal training tasks, we can teach a dog to match similar objects using clicker training. This video is a great example of matching because the trainer does an excellent job of breaking the task down into smaller component skills that will be needed for the final task. For instance, she first teaches the dog first to stay on the mat, pick up the objects and look at the object she is holding. Sometimes, we have trouble during training because we’ve forgotten to teach an important component or foundation skill that the animal needs to understand first.
So, check out the video below and let me know what you think. I would love to try this with one of the horses, as I’m sure that the horses could also do it!
Also, my latest post with shaping Ginger generated some interesting discussion on facebook and in the comments. I copied some of the discussion from facebook into the comments section of that post. I’m really interested to continue this task now, to see what happens with the licking!
thats so cool! I was thinking the same thing as I watched it…..so if I lost a glove I could send my dog to find it in the house.. 🙂
I would like to know what her eyes are doing. Is the trainer LOOKING at the object she wants him to pick up? If you watch her hands, she is each time, slighly pointing to the object that matches with her hand. If the object is on the left, her hand is off center to the left, if the object is to the right, her hand is off center to the right, if the object is to the center her hand is on the center. It’s still a very cool thing! And if her dog is able to in the end find her matching sneaker any where in the house as she says at the end of the video, the subtle cues she may have given with her eyes or hand placement may not have mattered in the long run.
Katrin,
You (and Chris as well below) make great points.
I have heard (from someone who has talked to the trainer in the video) that she later tried it with the bench on the far side of the room so that the dog was moving away from her and with it’s back to her. (And the dog still got it.)
However, I think you’re right, it would be nice to have some more video footage that included what she was doing and also some tests to check and rule out any clever hans effects. For instance, could the dog do it with a different trainer?
Mary
it’s still pretty cool training. It may not stand up to testing but even if subtle cues were used, accidentally or purposefully, it still shows what a dog and trainer can do with a lot of patience and solid technique:)
Great video!!! Agree with Katrin that that may be some accidental cueing at work there. I could reference Clever Hans for all you horse people out there:) Cognition work really is a great mental workout for any animal. We start all of our animal sessions(marine mammal) with a shape. Each animal has their own shape and they have to go find it and touch it in order for their session to start. I’ve seen a ton of cognition studies with marine mammals and this was a great video to show off some canine cognitive potential.
Thanks for sharing this! I’ve been wanting to try something like this with my horse, and now you’ve given me some good ideas on how to set it up. He greatly enjoys our sessions with colour discrimination, though we’ve never gotten past the Clever Hans stage.
Lottie,
I you give this a try, I would love to hear how you set it up and how it ends up going!
Mary
That demo was really admiring! Training dogs can definitely be fulfilling once the dog is able to grasp how things are done, it makes things easy for the owner when this happens. If I have a neat skill as a dog trainer, I would surely start a dog training business of my own. Thanks for the cool share!