Hi,
Yesterday, we piled through a lot of material. Today we get more practical.
Remember, we talked about two strategies to teach a new skill.
Response shaping and stimulus shaping or fading
Don’t get hung up by the terminology. I found both stimulus fading and stimulus shaping in the literature. Some authors seem to use both interchangeably, and others prefer a distinction.
I like the term ‘shaping’ for both response and stimulus because, as trainers, we understand the concept of successive approximation to build behavior.
I have also mentioned the term ‘transferring action’, which Mary Hunter and Jesús Rosales-Ruiz use in PORTL to describe the ‘transfer’ of an action to a different context. The example I used was transferring Blondie’s holding the fetch toy in her mouth to the bitted bridle.
Whatever you want to call it, the critical piece is that we can shape either the response (action) OR the stimulus (environment). Remember to change the criterion for only one of them!
I promised you an actionable example of this ‘errorless learning’ concept. So here’s the lesson:
Lesson 3: The expanding ellipse
This is what you need:
- 2 mats
- 4-6 cones
- Foundation lesson: Standing on a mat
Note:
The foundation lesson is not a static ‘standing on a mat.’ The behavior contains the whole movement cycle: 1. going to the mat, 2. standing on the mat, 3. leaving the mat.
What’s a movement cycle?
A movement cycle is a repeatable unit of behavior. It specifies a starting position and a series of behavior-environment interactions that continue until the organism is back at the starting point and can begin the movement cycle again.
~Jesús Rosales-Ruiz
In other words:
The behavior is not completed until the organism is in a position to repeat it.
This ties back to the definition of behavior which, according to Skinner (1938), contains both movement and environment, e.g., pressing (action) a lever (environment).
By behavior, then, I mean simply the movement of an organism or of its parts in a frame of reference provided by the organism itself or by various external objects or fields of force. It is convenient to speak of this as the action of the organism upon the outside world, and it is often desirable to deal with an effect rather than with the movement itself, as in the case of the production of sounds.
~ Skinner, B. F. (2019). The behavior of organisms: An experimental analysis. BF Skinner Foundation.
So interesting, but let’s get back to the lesson.
I used is the following setup.
Blondie steps on the mat, click/treat, and then I send her off to go around the cones to reach the next mat, click/treat, repeat.
This behavior is already in repertoire (starting point).
Now I gradually move two of the cones, one at a time. For example, if the mats are at 6 and 12 o’clock, I move the cones at 3 and 9 o’clock.
As in the previous lesson, I move only one cone and move it only so much that Blondie barely notices. The base behavior of going from mat to mat around the cones is always maintained.
As noted before, move the cones after your horse passed, not in front of its feet.
This setup turns the cones into landmarks, and your horse learns to go around them instead of cutting the line to get to the next mat.
It also creates the opportunity to practice turns which are great balance exercises. Blondie needs to figure out how to organise herself for the turn. If there are physical issues, she can manage them herself and I can, of course, encourage good turns with a click/treat.
Here’s how the lesson developed with Blondie.
Pauses
I also begin to differentiate the cues for staying on the mat in “Grown-ups are talking, please don’t interrupt,” which is another foundation lesson in repertoire, and for “walk forward.”
I don’t want that Blondie always rushes straight to the next mat. Instead, she learns to watch for signals that predict when staying on the mat is reinforced or when leaving it.
The foundation lesson “Grown-ups” also acts as a balancer for active, energetic actions. Again, the pauses are important so that Blondie learns to return to calm after I ask for more engagement.
This prepares her for work in trot or canter or even piaffe at some point (always dream big). She learns to offer energy and return to calm afterward.
I leave you to play with this lesson, tell me how it went.
Until next time,
Michaela