Positive Reinforcment – Reward the good behavior
You may or may not have heard of Operant Conditioning, but this is the basic concept behind a lot of training done today. There are 4 parts to it, and I wanted to focus on one part each week. The 4 parts are: Positive Reinforcement, Positive Punishment, Negative Reinforcement, and Negative Punishment. Now, please don’t get caught up on the words themselves, because they might not mean exactly what you first think 😉 I’ll get to them all, I promise! Let’s look at the first training term: Positive Reinforcement.
Training Terms:
The first term I need to introduce you to – because it will be used a lot in this series – is “stimulus”.
According to Wikipedia:
A stimulus is something that causes a physiological or psychological response:
- Stimulation
- Stimulus (physiology), something external that influences an activity
- Stimulus (psychology), a concept in behaviorism and perception
Stay with me here on this next part: “positive” and “negative” do NOT mean “good” or “bad”. You have to think in more mathematical terms, here: POSITIVE = ADDITION, NEGATIVE = SUBTRACTION.
Operant conditioning is all about the addition or removal of a stimulus into the environment and how that effects the frequency of the behavior.
Now, reinforcement and punishment refer to a consequence that cause a behavior to occur more or less frequently: REINFORCEMENT = CONSEQUENCE CAUSES GREATER FREQUENCY; PUNISHMENT = CONSEQUENCE CAUSES LESS FREQUENCY.
So, following this train of thought, Positive Reinforcement occurs when the addition of a stimulus (usually seen as pleasant to the subject) increases the frequency of a behavior.
Using Positive Reinforcement in Dog Training:
For us, in the dog training scenario, we add the stimulus when the dog does a behavior we like or want them to do. The most popular type of stimulus is a food reward, but it could also be praise (verbal or physical), a ball, favorite toy, a trip to the shade on a sunny day…anything the dog sees as pleasant.
Positive Reinforcement is the most popular (or well-known) type of training. You or your trainer may be using it without actually using the term itself. Any time you treat- or clicker-train, you are using positive reinforcement. Any time you praise your dog for doing something right, that is positive reinforcement. For example: You tell your dog to sit, they sit (behavior), you give them a treat (stimulus); the frequency that they will sit when you tell them increases because they want to get the treat every time (reinforcement).
Clicker Training as Positive Reinforcement
The example above uses just a treat. Clicker-training is treat-training with the tool of a clicker. The clicker provides a “bridge” from the time the dog does a behavior until the time they get the treat. Basically, it lets them know they did something right, and the reward is coming. Clickers are great because you can mark specific behaviors, train a chain of behaviors, and mark specific behaviors when the dog may be a distance away but you want them to know they did it right.
As trainers, we don’t always use the terms of Operant Conditioning because it can get confusing. And we are trying to make the experience as least confusing as possible for our clients. So, forgive us if we just demonstrate versus taking time out of your lesson to define all the terms ;-P We’ve found a lot of our clients learn better by watching/doing versus us trying to explain too much anyway 😉
I hope this helped clear some confusion if there was any. Next week, we’ll tackle Positive Punishment (remember – it’s not as bad as it looks!).
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