This post is part of a series of several posts on cues.
When teaching a new behavior, we have control over when we introduce the cue. Many clicker trainers advocate getting the behavior before ever introducing the cue. Here’s a bit about each teaching method.
Introduce the cue, then the behavior.
Many traditional trainers and some clicker trainers teach this way. For instance, the trainer tells the dog to sit. The dog stares at him dumbly, as she has no idea what the word “sit” means. He pushes her into a sit, and gives her a treat. He repeats this a dozen times, until the dog eventually realizes that she can get the treat faster and avoid being pushed around if she just sits as soon as it hears the word “sit.”
This can be an effective way to teach cues. However, by teaching this way, we often end up using quite a bit of negative reinforcement. Even if we are using treats, the animal is still following the cue in order to avoid being physically pushed into a sit. Also, unless care is taken, the animal can get confused or frustrated at the beginning when the cue has no meaning.
Most traditional horse training works this way, mainly because traditional horse training is largely dependent on negative reinforcement and pressure for teaching behaviors. Some trainers like this because they have the pressure and negative reinforcement to back up the cue if the animal does not comply. However, this is an easy way to create an animal who is complying only to avoid further repercussions.
Get the behavior, then add a cue.
This seems counter-intuitive, but it’s actually a very successful way to train behavior. First, we get the animal consistently offering the behavior. With behaviors that occur frequently, we can capture and reward whenever the behavior occurs. For less frequent or novel behaviors, we can lure or shape the animal until we get the behavior.
Then, there’s several ways to add on a cue. A trainer with a good eye can give the cue right when the behavior is starting or right before the behavior starts. Or, if the behavior is occurring frequently, a trainer could alternate between cue and no cue. Give the cue, see the behavior, reinforce. Then let the animal do the behavior and don’t reinforce. Repeat until the animal gets the hang of it. In any case, next we have to extinguish the behavior from occurring off cue and begin to put the behavior under stimulus control.
One advantage of this method is that the meaning of the cue is totally clear. The dog already understands we want it to sit, so by the time we introduce the cue, sit means sit. In the previous method, the sit cue is a bit more ambiguous to the dog. The sit cue could mean sit, or it could mean wait around until the trainer pushes the dog into a sit.
Hello,
I am a beginning clicker trainer and I am slightly confused about putting a behavior on cue and then getting the cue on stimulus control. I have Alexandra Kurland’s “The Click that Teaches Step by Step in Pictures” book and Leslie Pavlich’s “Colt Starting the Natural Horse” and have recently rented Alexandra’s Loopy Training dvd disc 1 from giddyupflix. I have learned some lessons the hard way, like don’t skip any steps in this training process, as I started targeting without the saftey barrier and created a pushy headstrong monster out of my new colt. But, after some initial frustration and uncertainty, I realized my mistake and went backwards in my steps and got behind the gate to work with the target 🙂 Once I had a clean loop ( I didn’t know at the time that was what we had, I was just bored with it and didn’t want to bore him) I started not bringing the target. Instead, I just went to the gate and stood there. IMy initial response to the targeting behind the gate was, “I don’t like that I am encouraging him to put his head over the gate.” So I thought about what I wanted him to do. I wanted him to wait on the other side without putting his head over the gate. So I stood in front of the gate and waited for him to take his head off the gate and put it back on his side. When he did that on his own, I clicked and treated (capturing the behavior?). He caught on very quickly. From there, we worked on duration of head on his side of the gate. When I felt safer about being around him with food, I then put a halter and lead on him and immediatley starting working on backing up (with AK’s halter and lead cue) to get him out of my space now that there was no gate. He has also got this very quickly. I now have him backing with a hand signal and verbal cue of “Back Up.” I am still clicking and treating this behavior every time he does it. Here is my problem at the moment though. Mostly, he backs on my cues. But sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes, he hesitates and then does it. Sometimes, all I have to do is walk into his pasture (to groom or put his halter on) and he offers me this behavior to cue me to give him a treat. And I don’t know what to do now. After watching AK’s Loopy training tonight, she said that this is cue communication and a good thing. But I don’t always want this behavior. I want it when I cue it, and I don’t mind it as a default behavior as it is much better than a pushy bargy horse, but I also now know that this is not a clean loop and therefore I need to fix it somehow. But I just feel stuck. I would like to say that I do have one behavior completely trained (but I am not really sure how it got so ingrained) and that is the disengagement of the hindquarters. All I have to do is touch him lightly on his hip with intention of movement and he swings them right out of the way. I was working on this when I first started targeting at liberty in his pasture per Leslie Pavlich’s methods. I abandoned it when I got behind my gate. But for some reason, this relinqishing to hip pressure has stuck. I don’t click for it and he doesn’t offer it unless I cue it. That is how I want all of my clicker trained things to look in the end, right? Sorry for the long post!
Hi Nicole,
Thanks for the long comment!
I will send you a e-mail privately and we can discuss this. 🙂
cheers,
Mary