I’m sharing some of my notes and thoughts related to the 2025 ABAI convention, which was held at the end of May in Washington, D.C.
One talk I enjoyed was an invited talk given by Dr. Tom Cariveau. Dr. Cariveau conducts research about skill acquisition and stimulus control.
A lot of the research he discussed in his presentation focused on teaching children to read. However, the big ideas in his talk also apply directly to animal training.
When you teach a cue (discriminative stimulus) for a behavior, what actually becomes the cue may or may not be what you think.
For example, when I go out to the pasture and call my young horse, I yell, “Chewie, come here!”
When I call Chewie, is she responding to the word “Chewie” or to the word “come” or to the word “here” or to the whole phrase?
Or, maybe she’s not responding to the words at all, but to the loudness of my voice or the changes in the pitch of my voice.
Would she come if someone else yelled these words? Maybe, maybe not!
Or, maybe I’m standing with my hands on my hips, and this position has become a cue for her to come. (Even though I don’t even realize I’m standing this way!)
If an animal responds correctly, we often assume that what we think is the cue is, in fact, the cue. However, just because your learner is 100% accurate does not guarantee that what you think is the cue is actually the cue.
This disconnect may become apparent when a trainer moves to the next step in a shaping plan and a behavior seems to break down unexpectedly.
For example, perhaps you think you’ve taught your horse to stand on a mat, but your horse has really learned to line up with his shoulder a certain distance away from you.
If you put this behavior in a longer chain of behaviors or try practicing when you are in a different position, your horse may not know what to do!
In the presentation at ABAI, Cariveau discussed that, for teaching to be successful, the teacher needs to make an effort to see what the learner is seeing and to understand what the learner is responding to.
Take some time this week and think about some of your animal’s cues.
Are you sure this cue is actually the cue? What else could possibly be serving as a cue?
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