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Aidan

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Everything posted by Aidan

  1. In any case they don't usually go back to the car and have a snooze? They usually run off and do something that offers more reinforcement, which is a Matching Law problem.
  2. That's a good idea! That would be good in other disciplines too. I should have been clearer, what is your dog actually doing? Running off to another obstacle instead of stopping to criteria?
  3. If reinforcement was discontinued completely then you could predict that. But this is virtually impossible in agility. So what happens after a sub-par stop? He has a choice right? This is a real world example of concurrent schedules.
  4. I don't disagree with that at all. I was offering another perspective that extinction can explain an increase in responding. The flip-side of that is that not seeing a decrease (Staranais' observation) does not prove that a stimulus is a reinforcer. Although I think in her case the rewards she mentioned probably were reinforcers, and that they were above the threshold of expectation for her dog despite being less than earlier rewards.
  5. What normally happens is that you get an "extinction curve". Particularly if a response has been reinforced quite a lot, you get an initial increase in the rate of responding before it drops off. A simple example is if you teach a pigeon to peck a key and reinforce each key peck on a fixed ratio of 1 reward for each key press (FR1), then suddenly stop reinforcing, the pigeon will peck harder and faster. It's as if he thinks "damned thing must be broken, surely if I hit it harder it will come good!", and then after a while of doing this he thinks "hmm, this isn't working... maybe I'll go over here and groom, come back later and see if they fixed it for me". If a response is strongly conditioned the increased rate of responding can continue for some time. An entire agility trial would not be out of the question, by any stretch. Plus, particularly in sports like Agility (and not so much in Obedience) there are reinforcers. So, you get what Gary Wilkes calls "riding the extinction bursts", the increased rate of responding IS reinforced. Add a stimulus condition (the trial environment) and voila, you have conditioned an increased rate of responding under those discriminative stimuli. Possibly! Not something we could prove or disprove easily. We could run a bunch of mock trial and genuine trial tests and look for statistically significant differences in the rates responding between the two but there are a ton of confounders. In any case the responses are emitted for the same discriminative stimuli in all cases (training or trial), the rate of reinforcement is reduced in a trial; we know those things for a fact, therefore we know that there will be extinction effects. This is not to say that your hypothesis would be disproved though, there can be more than one reason for changes in behaviour. ETA: see Fig 8 here: http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Skinner/Theories/ for an example of an extinction curve. The cumulative responses on the Y-axis build rapidly, then level off over time, i.e the rate of responding increases, then reduces until the response is extinguished.
  6. You can either suppress it with punishment or reinforce an alternative response. Either way, controlled set-ups are the way to do it. I'm not running any classes until daylight savings, but this is something we would do lots of with Willow. My preference is to click as soon as they see the other dog, so they are still in position, haven't lunged, right where you want them to be. At an appropriate distance you can get a lot of reinforced trials in this way, when it starts to become anticipated that you will pay this you hold off and see what happens, if it goes "see other dog, head whips around back to you" then you can start clicking then, when they have looked back towards you. When that is all good, we then work on on-leash greetings with no pulling.
  7. OK, I'm getting all that. What I'd like to determine is by what mechanism would this lead to an increased rate of responding (if not extinction)? Why does the response differ in a different environment? If it is an identifiable phenomenon then it isn't simply a chance event, so there must be a reason, some mechanism of behaviour that causes it. Are we on the same page with extinction - that unreinforced trials often lead to a temporary increase in the rate of responding?
  8. Regardless of her motivation, you solve the problem the same way you would if she were on her own. Wanting to be out in front might be making it worse, but there is nothing you can do to stop her feeling that way except give her a reason not to be out in front and my preferred way to do that is to - never let a dog get anywhere on a tight leash, reward when in position. Nothing magical.
  9. So are you saying that you wouldn't get a similarly increased rate of responding in a training situation with no reinforcers for a single run? By what other mechanism would you attribute this increased rate of responding to a different environment? The discriminative stimuli are the same, the consequences are different. The shoe fits...
  10. There is always room for improvement, for both dogs and handlers.
  11. Extinction? huh? What I am trying to say is that once a behaviour becomes self rewarding, it is possible to reward less with no detrimentral effect. Responses typically increase temporarily during unreinforced trials. It is a well documented extinction effect. Some of these behaviours are reinforcing in themselves, but the rate of reinforcement during a trial would be typically much lower than during training so you would expect responding to increase temporarily as an extinction effect, particularly if your dog has an expectation of some other reward. It doesn't mean the response will be extinguished, but it is still an effect of extinction; a temporarily increased rate of responding.
  12. Is the DentaStick being used as a reinforcer during or after the stay? Is it an effective reinforcer (i.e are you getting more of the response?) During the trials and mock trials, are these done with other dogs? Does your training plan include other dogs also in stays? A judge? A ring? Look for the differences between training and trialling situations, work them in. Rather than setting arbitrary limits for duration, I'd prefer a results based approach such as the "300 Peck" method http://positivepetzine.com/300_Peck , or if you would prefer, only increase duration at a rate where you get success in 4/5 trials and adjust time based on whether you got 4/5 or not.
  13. Get some big eye bolts and screw them into the floor or skirtings, you can usually hide them away a little, say behind a curtain or under the lounge. Skirtings often aren't very well attached, so you want to go through the skirting and into the framework behind.
  14. On it's own in play it is usually insignificant. If both dogs have otherwise good social signalling then there is usually nothing to worry about, so for e.g, even if it did get a bit rough, if one dog showed signs of anxiety or tried to get away and the other dog respected that then it wouldn't usually be something to worry about (notice I'm using the word "usually" a lot though, nothing is ever black and white). It's an issue when one of the dogs is not respecting the feelings of the other and ignoring their signals. One of my dogs bites the belly, legs and throat of the other. She has never drawn blood but I cautiously consider these to be "death threats" because she does not respect the other's wishes if he tries to get away or displays cut-off signals (and that is not fair on him, even if she really had no intention to ever really hurt him). It got to a point where there was a bit too much excitement in their environment (my daughter) so I separate them unless I'm able to give them enough of my attention to keep things under control.
  15. Bob Bailey (and myself and others) have long promoted the idea of not using jackpots. Rewards themselves aren't faded, but the schedule of reinforcement may be manipulated. However I don't recommend the sort of standardised reward systems used in laboratories for practical reasons, apart from making the whole process a bit tedious in real life, it doesn't work when the job at hand might be significantly more reinforcing than the reinforcers you can more easily manipulate (such as food). For this I have been experimenting with what I call a "scaffolding" approach, where basic responses are built with food (or some other convenient reinforcer) then the big rewards are introduced when the dog is fluent at all the things we need them to do around the big reward. It's not really different to what other trainers do, but I'm giving it a fancy name and making some of the concepts a bit clearer to make it a more efficient, better defined process for dog trainers. We mustn't forget "matching law" in all of this, which you might find in Lindsay under "concurrent schedules" or "generalised matching law". Matching law quite reliably predicts (at least in animals) what happens when the dog has choices about what he can do, what happens when you have lots of little reinforcers vs one big reinforcer, what happens when a reinforcer for one response is delivered immediately vs a reinforcer for a different response being delivered after a delay and that sort of thing. I'm not sure that I completely follow Lindsay's logic behind a third class of reward. The definition of reinforcement has always been something that "increases or maintains a response" to the best of my recollection. And that is all the proof you need of reinforcement - was the response maintained or increased? In this day and age of being able to look very closely inside the brain we're discovering all sorts of things about reinforcement and punishment. Negative reinforcement lights up the same parts of the brain as positive reinforcement (at least after cessation), for e.g. Learning is more relative than absolute. Each time we click the clicker there isn't a column that gets a token added to it inside the brain, but something is increased relative to something else, from what I can gather.
  16. Hi melzawelza, yes you can legally use an e-collar or electronic containment system in Tasmania to the best of my knowledge and they are available in some of the larger pet shops and can be brought in to the state from other states without consequence. If she needs further advice once here she can contact me. PM for details.
  17. It only needs to happen once. Bites to the legs are a concern. The bites to the face and ears are just self defence usually.
  18. I too got the impression that these dogs were being left together unreasonably but the poster did not say what the long term outcome will be and I don't envy her position. Personally, I would separate them. It is impossible to tell from a couple of photos but what evidence there is suggests that the Lab is not messing around.
  19. - could have been the house bricks, Aidan I shall stop playing fetch with them then!
  20. A sheet metal worker will be able to fold one up for you. That's a big crate for a pup, I take it you are using it sort of like a small ex-pen?
  21. I agree with those who have said don't allow either dog on the couch and I am a "dog on the couch" kind of guy. Whatever the motivation (I won't speculate) from what you have described it is an antecedent for trouble and it certainly isn't setting you up for success in dealing with the problem. However, I wouldn't boot Indy off the couch when she growls. Other dogs are often MORE than happy to finish off a disciplining job for you, which is not abnormal but could be a disaster. So it's better not to be going down that path, if she isn't on the couch in the first place half your battle is won before it starts. Here is an exercise which is fantastic for multiple dog homes and it fits in well with your excellent policy of the house being a quiet, calm place: tether both dogs somewhere where they can't get to each other but not too far apart, make sure the tethers are good (e.g a staffy would be able to pull a couch by the leg if that is your tether point). Have mats down for both dogs. Ask the dogs to drop, but don't insist on a formal obedience drop. We want a relaxed, sleepy drop. Walk away a very short distance, if the dogs are down, return to each of them and reward with some attention. Never return to or pay attention to a dog who isn't staying dropped on the bed. Build up the distance, duration and distractions so that your dogs are bomb-proof and cannot be fooled into getting up (unless you ask them to). This doesn't take long with a tether and neither dog is likely to start anything, although it can be a lot easier to begin training each dog separately if it proves difficult for you. Later you would remove the tethers, then build up the behaviour again. In the short term, both dogs will be safe from each other and in the long term they will have bomb-proof "long downs".
  22. Do rats ever eat their own poo?
  23. Tennis balls will wear dogs teeth down, but then again, so will carrying around house-bricks so it's hard to say what caused my GSDs teeth to wear so badly...
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