What’s the best way to train an animal? What about the best way to teach a human to train an animal? How can we use the science of behavior and learning to develop better training practices? In this section you’ll find lots of articles and information about the science of animal training, research that has been done on animal learning and behavior, and information about teaching people.
I’m working on a project right now about reinforcers. (More on this soon in an upcoming post!) So, as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about reinforcement, reinforcers, and the different types of things trainers use during training to reward behavior. Many horse clicker trainers primarily use food during training to reinforce correct behavior. […]
Have you heard of Chaser, the dog who knows 1,000 words? There’s a neat article that was published on the Scientific American blog earlier this week about Chaser and her owner and trainer, Dr. John Pilley. You can find the full article on their site here. Most media reports about Chaser have focused on Chaser’s […]
Please visit my conference and seminar notes page for more notes from this seminar. Earlier this summer, I had the chance to audit a seminar in Dallas with dog trainer Michele Pouliot. If you’re not familiar with Michele, I encourage you to check out her website. Michele is a very talented dog trainer who has […]
How do you structure your training sessions? How long is each session? Do you take breaks during the session, or just train continuously? We had an interesting discussion about this recently on one of the online horse clicker training groups. This was one of the replies I wrote to the group and I thought it […]
This post is going to be about teaching people, rather than training animals. (However, it will involve some pretty cute animated animals!) Many of the principles of good animal training apply equally as well to teaching humans. In fact, behavior analysts were designing positive reinforcement based teaching programs for people long before clicker training caught […]
I'm in Minneapolis for a few days, at the annual convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis International. I am having a great time so far and have gotten a chance to catch up with lots of friends, as well as had time to meet plenty of new ones. My advisor, Dr. Jesus Rosales-Ruiz, […]
