9/15/2023 0 Comments I regress show ponies![]() You can quickly shift the behavior into something you want, but with these “one trick ponies” you have to be so very careful what you click. With a creative learner this isn’t a problem. One click and suddenly you’ve locked in a behavior you don’t want. We see this so many times with our animal learners. The learner latches on to that, expanding her repertoire to two behaviors – touching the chair and knocking it over. The chair accidentally falls over – click and treat. This is repeated several times, and then the trainer takes the car away and sets the chair out. The learner pushes the car over the table top. Using an object that normally would be pushed makes it very easy to get the desired action. So the trainer takes the chair away and sets out a toy car. Getting her to push the chair is going to be hard. In her first few attempts she touches the chair, but she doesn’t try any other behaviors. She is like so many of our animal learners – hesitant, lacking in confidence, and not showing any outward signs of curiosity. In fact, quite the opposite – she may have been punished for stepping “outside the lines”. Her learner doesn’t have a lot of experience being reinforced for trying things. Again, the trainer may be dealing with a history of punishment. She offers simple touches, but nothing else. The learner in this case is not particularly creative. Her first step would be reinforcing the learner for touching the chair. Through a series of small approximations, the trainer could try to shaping the behavior she wants. Pushing a dice over the table like a toy car is not an obvious behavior to try. The learner would have tossed the dice or shaken it in her hand because that’s what you do with this kind of object. In this case we have a learner who was scolded as a child for pushing her chair over the floor, so she’s not very likely to offer this type of behavior with the toy chair.Ī history of punishment has played a role in depressing chair pushing behavior for this learner, but pushing would also have been an unlikely behavior if the trainer had set down a dice. The learner is going to draw on all of her previous repertoire of things she has done with chairs. But with this learner there’s no sign of any chair pushing behavior. ![]() The learner might begin offering the behavior she’s after within the first couple of clicks. We’ll now observe quietly in the background while the learner begins to interact with the chair. The goal is to get the learner to push the chair over the table the way she might push a toy car. The trainer sets a toy chair on the table for her learner to interact with. If you aren’t sure how you can turn what seems like a negative procedure into a positive teaching strategy, PORTL can once again help to illustrate how this works. Resurgence and regression can be very negative procedures, but they can also be used to produce what might otherwise be very difficult behaviors to obtain. Think about the way advertisers manipulate our behavior to encourage smoking or overeating. But the associations created through positive reinforcement can create addictions to harmful behaviors. We want to use positive reinforcement with our animals because we see it as being both effective and more humane. Mastering Micro: Building Unlikely Behaviors with Resurgence ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |