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I just finished reading Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor, which is apparently a classic popular account of animal training based off Skinners ideas. It's pret
by tgb 5y ago
I just finished reading Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor, which is apparently a classic popular account of animal training based off Skinners ideas. It's pretty interesting but a little too self congratulatory. The short summary is:
- punishment usually comes too late and also makes the trainee dislike the trainer and so makes future training harder
- rewards should come immediately at success
- since most rewards can't be given immediately, develop a cue (a "clicker" is popular) which you give at the immediate moment that informs them they're about to get the reward. This bridges the time span between act and reward, and the cue itself becomes valuable to the trainee later
- variable rewards often work better
- trainees in a rut can sometimes be jolted out of the rut by giving them an undeserved reward jackpot
- teaching a trainee to not do something is harder but one strategy is to teach them to do it on command. Then simply don't never give them the command. Most behaviors die out once trainned to command except when commanded
- or train them to do something that is incompatible with the undesired behavior
- bizarrely, stopping doing an undesirable task can be reward enough to train them to do the undesirable task. I'm not super clear on how you do this in practice
- giving cues and rewards too late is a common error. It's counterintuitive because you often must interrupt the behavior you are training. Rewarding your dog for sitting will cause the dog to stop sitting, but you must do this. Waiting until the dog stops sitting is too late since then you are rewarding the stopping of sitting, not sitting itself.
- all of this applies to humans (if you don't let them know what you're doing) and also to yourself, supposedly
I'm trying to train my misbehaving cat. We're making some progress but it's not as fast and magical as the book makes it sound (my inexperienced training skills likely contributing).
I'm also learning Mandarin and a lot of what I've learned is through apps like Anki. Feedback is instant. But it doesn't really feel that rewarding to get a card right, so I'm not sure how successful it is in a Skinnerian sense. Teaching machines are here and work but I think they're still suboptimal.
- david_allison 5y ago> I'm also learning Mandarin and a lot of what I've learned is through apps like Anki. Feedback is instant. But it doesn't really feel that rewarding to get a card right, so I'm not sure how successful it is in a Skinnerian sense. Teaching machines are here and work but I think they're still suboptimal. A lot of users use addons to provide positive feedback in Anki. You may want to give them a try https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1722658993 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1722658993 - Puppy Reinforcement https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/579111794 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/579111794 - Anki Killstreaks https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/41708974 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/41708974 - Leaderboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkveLkAgXiM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkveLkAgXiM - Anki Add-on Guide: Gamify Your Reviews
- DoneWithAllThat 5y agoHaving read and applied Pryor’s book and having not-insignificant experience with animal training: no, all of it does not apply to humans. It’s tempting to want to ascribe all human behavior to “lizard-brain” motivations (and fits nicely with modern fads like an obsession with unconscious bias) but humans are far smarter and more adaptable than animals (including and especially dogs). Techniques like extinguishment for instance work very poorly with humans while working exceptionally well with dogs. I’d say the pieces that are best for influencing how to work with people are (and obviously much of this does come from Skinner) are variable reward systems and immediate feedback of good/bad behavior. That’s about it. I’ll also close by saying that Pryor’s methods are most relevant when there is ample time for the training and when consequences of misbehavior are relatively low. If the behavior being extinguished is for example randomly attacking other dogs, Pryor’s methods don’t effectively address that kind of thing, despite her claims to the contrary. And while Koehler gets a lot of justified criticism, in my experience with potentially dangerous animals at least like large-breed working dogs, a mix of Pryor-like and Koehler-like approaches are required. The happy clicky feedback isn’t going to convince an aggressive Malinois not to shred someone’s arm, much as we wish it would.