Animals like knowing that something good is coming. Think about how excited children get when they know a reward is coming–the kid squirming in his chair 5 minutes before the final school bell rings or the anxious child 2 days before Christmas. Expectations and anticipation can make rewards even more exciting than they might be otherwise.
In Animals Make Us Human, Temple Grandin discusses how for some species, announced rewards are even more exciting than unannounced rewards. In a very interesting passage, she discusses how announced rewards turn on the SEEKING emotion in pigs:
The other approach to satisfying the SEEKING emotion that I like is announced rewards. Instead of just giving the pigs their straw a couple of times a day, you use a conditioned signal to alert them to the fact that the straw is coming. That puts the pigs into the looking-forward-to state all animals and people love. There have been two studies of announced rewards or enrichments that I know of. Both found that an announced reward or enrichment made the animals act happier. One study looked at two groups of piglets that were stressed out because they were being weaned. In the experimental group, the pigs heard a doorbell just before a door opened up and let them into a hallway covered with straw and mixed seeds. That turned the doorbell into a conditioned stimulus, like the bell for Pavlov’s dogs or the clicker in clicker training. The control-group pigs were given the straw and seeds with no announcement. The “anticipation” pigs played more and fought less after they were weaned than the control pigs.
I find this fascinating. When a reward is classically conditioned with a stimulus such as a bell, the reward has a greater effect than when it is just given by itself. I’m going to have to find that pig paper and read it, although I’m not sure that scientists really understand why this effect occurs.
Related posts discussing passages from Animals Make Us Human.
Grandin has done some great work but some of her comments are off the mark so discernment needs to be used in reading her work (and that of anyone for that matter).
What happens in a lot of classical conditioning situations is that it is done by people without intention and can increase the anticipation (aka stress situation) which results in aberrant or stereotypical behavior.
Livestock, zoo animals, and pets all pick up on the nuances of patterns in the daily routine and even if you don’t use a particular stimulus intentionally–they exist whether people are clued into the subtle triggers or not.
Pacing, barking, trotting, and other behaviors escalate in many patterned situations.
This is one of the reasons I prefer that handlers NOT be predictable.
I wrote about this some time back (before IMATA did a discussion forum on this) called Consistency versus Predictability as related to training errors.
Interesting perspective Ark Lady.
I think classical conditioning happens a lot more than we realize it, with both good and bad consequences.
I haven’t actually read the pig paper yet, so I can’t comment on it and what they found besides for what Grandin says.
I think Grandin sometimes gets off the mark with her own interpretations and theories, so I do try to be careful with what she says. “Animals Make Us Human” is chalk full of information about animal emotions, much of which is purely her theorizing. We can’t know emotions, we can only know and interpret the behavior we see.
However, she has done great things for the welfare of many production animals (beef cattle, swine, layers, broilers) and I think she does have many good ideas for improving animal welfare. I like her approach—rather than attacking and alienating people in industry, she looks objectively at where we are now, what direction we should be headed in, and what steps we can be taking to improve welfare. (Including helping advocate about positive training for cats, dogs, horses.)
Mary
Maybe people and animals just prefer certainty to uncertainty. Knowing something bad might happen is more stressful than knowing something will happen (source: http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/what-you-dont-know-makes-you-nervous/?scp=1&sq=intense%20electric%20shock&st=cse), so maybe knowing that something good will happen is just extra nice?