erstellt am: 18 Okt 2009 11:29
dies ist die zweite Hälfte eines Mails. Der erste Teil geht über
Hip Shoulder Shoulder und ihr findet ihn
hier-----------------------------------------------------------
Loopy Training
You would think that this would be a great place to end this post, but you'd be wrong. Before I plunge head long into my next project, I want to catch people up on this year's clinic theme. Every year the clinics focus on a particular aspect of the work. They have a general theme that runs through all the clinics even though the horses are at very different stages in the work. This year's theme is loopy training. The description I just gave you for teaching hip-shoulder-shoulder is a great example of loopy training. Once I've defined what loopy training is, you'll be able to read back through the first half of this post, and you'll recognize the loops in the training steps I outlined. I deliberately didn't write them out in loop form to start with. That's a task I want you to do later.
So what is loopy training? In a very real sense loopy training is what we've been doing right along. It's nothing new. We just didn't call what we were doing by that name. We also might not have recognized with any deliberate intent that we were using loops. The reason for giving something a name is it draws attention to it and creates greater clarity, or at least awareness around an idea.
The Naming of Things
I backed off a bit from the word clarity because sometimes what a name does is raise even more questions about a subject. The whole field of operant conditioning is a great example. Skinner didn't invent positive and negative reinforcement. But putting labels on these concepts made them something we could focus on more directly and ask more questions about. Just look at the number of books and articles that have been written about operant conditioning, and you'll see how many questions have been asked since Skinner attached a names to concepts.
In my work the first thing that I attached a name to was the t'ai chi wall. I was referring to a rope handling technique, one of many that I use. I gave it a name as a form of shorthand, a way to refer quickly to a particular action down the rope. What I didn't count on was how naming it turned it into a separate entity. It gave the t'ai chi wall a status above other unnamed rope handling techniques. It gave it a life that the other techniques did not have.
At first I was not at all sure I liked the result. It seemed to separate this technique from everything else, to raise it above other rope handling skills in the magnitude of importance. But over time as other names evolved and the whole process became integrated into an overall style of rope handling that I refer to now as t'ai chi rope handling, I've come to appreciate the naming process and the role that it plays in the evolution of ideas.
So for all those people who have been telling me I need to come up with a new name for the work I do, that clicker training just doesn't describe it completely enough, here's the next entry into the naming game: loopy training! If you're in one of those situations where people are giving you a hard time for clicker training, you can look them straight in the face and say you aren't just a clicker trainer. You're a loopy clicker trainer! Hmm. I think not. We'll have to keep looking for that perfect name. We'll keep loopy training to ourselves - at least for now. We'll let it refer to a specific training strategy, one that gives us a way to identify good clicker training.
Loopy Training Defined
So what is loopy training? If you're at all familiar with clicker training, you've seen this phrase:
Behavior => click => reinforcement.
That's the basic premise of clicker training. We want to make a certain behavior more likely to occur in the future, so we mark the occurrence of that behavior with an easily perceived, distinctive signal. Then we link that signal to the presentation of something the animal will actively work for. When the connection is made, the animal repeats the behavior in order to get the handler to click and reinforce him.
When the behavior is happening consistently, the handler can attach a cue to it so the phrase becomes:
Cue => behavior => click => reinforcement.
But these simple phrases should really be seen more as loops. It isn't the single presentation of the click followed by the reinforcer that strengthens the desired behavior. It is the repetition of the entire sequence. So what we have is:
Behavior => click => reinforcement
=> behavior => click => reinforcement
=> behavior => click => reinforcement
=>
And once a cue has been attached:
Cue => behavior => click => reinforcement
=>Cue => behavior => click => reinforcement
=>Cue => behavior => click => reinforcement
=>
In other words we have loops.
The Evolution of The Term
The idea of loopy training grew out of several converging threads. One was based on observations I was making at the Clicker Expos. At the Expos I watched some elegant examples of shaping. With dogs food delivery is often done by tossing the food out away from the dog. This creates an automatic reset back to the beginning of the behavior. For example, if a dog is being reinforced for going to a mat, tossing the food out away from the mat creates another opportunity for the dog to find the mat. Click => toss the treat out away from the mat. The dog leaps off his mat to retrieve the food and turns back immediately to repeat the clickable behavior - landing his feet on the mat.
That's what happens when training is going well - when the dog understands the whole food retrieval part of the equation. Click, glance at the handler to see which way the food is being tossed, go get it, then return immediately to the task. Perfect.
Except at the Expos I was also watching novice handlers working with dogs who didn't understand the treat retrieval part of the equation. They didn't always track the food toss so they missed getting any treat and quickly became discouraged. Or they found the treat, but then kept hunting for more. Ever hopeful, they obviously thought one piece of hot dog on the ground must mean that there would be more. Their brains had obviously switched from the puzzle solving, engage-with-your-person mode into the follow-your-nose, single-focused hunt mode. When they were satisfied that no more hotdogs were to be found, they remembered that their human was there and that he/she could generally be counted on for some entertainment. But by then the connection with the earlier behavior was a distant and all but forgotten memory.