Every semester, I have somewhere between 30-50 students in the undergraduate course that I teach. That’s a lot of names to learn! I’m not good at learning names. I’ll get “Mike”and “Mark” mixed up. Or, I won’t be able to keep straight the two students who always sit together. And never mind the student who […]
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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.
Help! My dog does nothing during shaping
“The continuousness of behavior means that the organism can be thought of as always doing something.” In September, I shared this quote on my blog and discussed how it relates to “problem” behaviors. You can find that post here. However, this quote also relates to shaping. If you spend some time on YouTube, you can […]
Something is always happening
My friend Dr. Joe Layng was in town this past weekend. While he was here, he gave a two-hour lecture for the Department of Behavior Analysis at UNT which was titled “Implications and applications of nonlinear contingency analysis.” Joe’s talk was packed full of great information. For this post, however, I want to focus on […]
Repeat after me….
Recently, I’ve been listening to a new podcast. It’s the Equiosity podcast, produced by Alexandra Kurland and Dominique Day. The conversations that Alexandra and Dominique have on the podcast center around horse training. However, the ideas they discuss are usually much bigger and apply to working with any species of animal. I think you would […]
Ferocious foxes and friendly foxes (a book review)
Last year was one of those really, really busy years. In addition to quite a bit of travel, I redesigned the undergraduate behavior analysis class that I teach. I learned a lot from the redesign process, but it ended up being a tremendously time-consuming project. One thing that I didn’t spend enough time doing last […]
Let’s go back a few steps
If you’ve spent any time training animals (or humans, for that matter), you know that things don’t always go as planned! Particular steps may end up taking much longer or shorter than your initially anticipated. And at certain steps, the animal may behave in a way that you didn’t expect at all. You should always […]