December 13, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY FULL Horses: Understanding Extinction: Part 12

Mastering Micro: Building Unlikely Behaviors with Resurgence
Nothing is either all good or all bad.

We want to use positive reinforcement with our animals because we see it as being both effective and more humane. But the associations created through positive reinforcement can create addictions to harmful behaviors. Think about the way advertisers manipulate our behavior to encourage smoking or overeating.

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.

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.

Here’s the set up:

The trainer sets a toy chair on the table for her learner to interact with. The goal is to get the learner to push the chair over the table the way she might push a toy car.

We’ll now observe quietly in the background while the learner begins to interact with the chair. The trainer could get lucky. The learner might begin offering the behavior she’s after within the first couple of clicks. But with this learner there’s no sign of any chair pushing behavior. Why?

History matters.

The learner is going to draw on all of her previous repertoire of things she has done with chairs. 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.

A 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 would have tossed the dice or shaken it in her hand because that’s what you do with this kind of object. Pushing a dice over the table like a toy car is not an obvious behavior to try.

Through a series of small approximations, the trainer could try to shaping the behavior she wants. Her first step would be reinforcing the learner for touching the chair.

The learner in this case is not particularly creative. She offers simple touches, but nothing else. Again, the trainer may be dealing with a history of punishment. Her learner doesn’t have a lot of experience being reinforced for trying things. In fact, quite the opposite – she may have been punished for stepping “outside the lines”. She is like so many of our animal learners – hesitant, lacking in confidence, and not showing any outward signs of curiosity. In her first few attempts she touches the chair, but she doesn’t try any other behaviors. Getting her to push the chair is going to be hard.

So the trainer takes the chair away and sets out a toy car. Using an object that normally would be pushed makes it very easy to get the desired action. The learner pushes the car over the table top. Click and treat.

This is repeated several times, and then the trainer takes the car away and sets the chair out. The learner goes back to touching it. The chair accidentally falls over – click and treat. The learner latches on to that, expanding her repertoire to two behaviors – touching the chair and knocking it over.

We see this so many times with our animal learners. One click and suddenly you’ve locked in a behavior you don’t want. With a creative learner this isn’t a problem. 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. In this case the learner persists in knocking the chair over even when she is no longer getting reinforced for the action.

Her trainer makes a quick decision and decides to put everything but pushing the chair like a car on extinction. Her learner is clearly becoming frustrated. To avoid having her shut down completely, the trainer takes the chair away and sets the car out again. The learner immediately starts pushing the car over the table top. Click and treat.

To help with the generalization the trainer puts a third object out – a small block. The learner pushes the block. Click and treat. This is repeated several times, then the trainer takes the block away and sets out the car. The car is pushed. Click and treat.

The trainer sets the chair out, and the learner pushes the chair. Job done.

Resurgence and Dog “Yoga”
Using the car in this way is an elegant teaching strategy. Often when we come up with these clever ways of helping our learner to be successful, we know that it works, but we don’t really have good explanations for why. Understanding resurgence helps us with the why in this case. And it helps us to be more deliberate in the use of this kind of teaching strategy. Here’s another example.

One of Kay Laurence’s students taught her dog to step up with his hind legs onto a chair. It was elegant training, a beautiful example of setting the learner up for success. In his talk on extinction, Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz helped us to see that it was also a great example of using resurgence.

Here’s the lesson: First, the dog learned to stand one foot each on four small plastic pods. This alone was impressive training. The pods were the same ones physiotherapists use to help people improve their balance and proprioception. It took great coordination for the dog to stay balanced on the four pods. But that was only step 1. Next he learned to keep his front feet on the floor while he maneuvered his hind feet up onto the brick ledge of a fireplace hearth.

Adding in the precision of the pods came next. Now the dog wasn’t just standing with his front paws on the floor and his hind end up on the ledge. He was also balancing on all four pods.

This was not done as a cute party trick. The dog’s owner is a yoga teacher. Her interest was very much the same as mine – helping her animal learner maintain a healthy spine. In this orientation she could ask her dog for weight shifts that contribute to a flexible spine.

The last step was setting up a training session next to a chair. The handler withheld the click, putting the dog into an extinction process. With very little experimentation, the dog oriented himself so his hind end was to the chair. He certainly demonstrated the flexibility of his spine by stepping up onto the chair with his hind legs so he was standing hind end up on the chair and front feet on the floor.

Generalization and Creativity
Jesús commented that if we didn’t know about resurgence we would simply be saying the dog generalized. That’s not a sufficient explanation. What we were seeing was a great example of resurgence. PORTL has given us a better understanding of how to encourage this kind of problem solving. When we want to train for this type of generalization, knowing about the “why” of resurgence helps us to be more deliberate and efficient in our training.

It isn’t positive reinforcement by itself that creates a positive learning experience. An eagerness for learning comes from being a successful puzzle solver. That success in turn comes from the kind of efficient, clean training that the clever use of resurgence encourages.

These examples give us a great perspective on creativity. When we’re training, we aren’t waiting and waiting for our animals to do something we can reinforce. Instead we can “seed” the behaviors we want them to draw on. Then we set up the conditions and let them have the pleasure of discovering for themselves new or unlikely combinations.

We have a procedure for setting up the creative process. You give your learner the repertoire, the components that form more complex behaviors, and then you set a puzzle and let extinction be the catalyst for solving it.

Coming Next: The “Pose”

Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.

I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends. But please remember this is copyrighted material. All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “JOY Full Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra Kurland, via theclickercenter.com

Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training. If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

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December 10, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY FULL Horses: Understanding Extinction: Part 9

Eureka Moments: What is Insight?

Using resurgence – Insight
Yesterday I shared several PORTL games developed by Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz. The games deliberately used extinction. What was observed was this: when you have been consistently reinforcing behaviors as you establish them in repertoire, and you then remove all reinforcement for them, you get a resurgence of these previously reinforced behaviors. They reoccur in the order in which they were trained.

When you instead extinguish the individual behaviors during the teaching phase, you get a different result. The student will go back to the most recently learned behavior. If that doesn’t work, he’ll go a little further back, and then a little further back.

In resurgence the behaviors occur in the order in which they were taught, so the oldest behavior in the cluster occurs first.

In regression the order reverses. The most recently taught behavior reappears first.

So how does this help us? How can we use this understanding to shape behavior? To get the ideas rolling Jesús shared several video examples where resurgence was used to train complex, creative behaviors.

The first video came from Robert Epstein’s work. Epstein was B.F. Skinner’s last graduate student. Together they were exploring the concept of “insight”. How do we solve puzzles? Are we truly creating something that has not existed before, or is creativity a product of combining known components to solve a novel puzzle?

Bird Brains
To explore this question Epstein taught a pigeon three component behaviors: pecking a banana, climbing on a box, and pushing the box towards a target.

The pigeon was then put into a chamber with the box and the banana. The banana was hung up out of reach. The pigeon couldn’t peck the banana, so an extinction process began. There was a resurgence of previously trained behaviors. The pigeon was able to push the box under the banana, get up on the box, and peck the banana.

How did the pigeon solve this puzzle so quickly? What is insight? What really is creativity? Skinner and Epstein would say the pigeon could solve the problem because it had in its existing repertoire the necessary components. Pigeons that had no experience pushing the box or jumping up on the box failed to solve the puzzle.

What is Creativity?
Jesús gives us a very process-oriented way thinking about this experiment. This kind of complex puzzle solving was achieved through resurgence. Set up the underlying components well, add in a bit of extinction, and “creativity” pops out.

If you leave out one of the components, the individual will struggle to solve the puzzle. He will experience a much longer extinction process. Macro extinction emotions will begin to surface, and you have to hope the subject has the persistence to become truly creative.

This is the kind of creativity that is truly stressful. It’s much better to analyze the end goal – the complex behavior you want to train – break it down into all of it’s component tasks, and then train each of the components separately. The result will be brilliant looking pigeons that solve in minutes what we might otherwise think would be an impossible puzzle for them.

Persistence
Jesús’ comment was there is “nothing new under the sun”. The behaviors you try are all built out of things you’ve done before. All the components of what appears to be a novel behavior have been trained in the past. So let’s consider what happens when a group of people are presented with a challenging puzzle. When they begin experimenting and find that the usual, familiar things aren’t working, some will give up quickly.

Others will persist. They will experiment with novel combinations of what they already know, but again most will quit if they don’t come up with a solution fairly quickly .

A few will keep trying until they stumble across a novel combination that works. We call these people inventors and creators because they are persistent enough to find these novel combinations. The discovery process can be a painful one, but once the new combination has been found, it’s easy for everyone else to copy the results.

I can absolutely relate to this. Give me a horse puzzle to solve, and I can be very persistent. My life experience has taught me that persistence pays off. But put me in front of a computer that isn’t cooperating, and I shut down fast. There my experience has produced a different set of expectations. I’ve been in enough situations where errors in a software program have made a problem unsolvable, at least for my level of computer skills. I don’t have the programing background that makes wrestling with a software issue fun. Extinction has gone too far and been too uncomfortable. So in one situation I can be very persistent and creative. In another I’m the one going through the classic cycle of emotions that macro extinction produces.

What I want to create for my learners is a feeling of confidence. Whether horse or human, I want them to KNOW they can solve whatever training puzzle I throw at them. Build this expectation in early before others have taught them hard lessons about failure, and you get brilliant, enthusiastic, joyful individuals. They are the optimists of this world. Whether horse or human, they are fun to be around. That’s what an understanding of these concepts helps us to create.

Coming Next: Degrees of Freedom

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December 2, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY Full Horses: Understanding Extinction: Part 2

Yesterday’s post ended with a quote from Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz: “If you don’t understand extinction, you won’t be able to master it.” Today’s post will begin to unravel what that means.

Regression and Resurgence
I’ve talked about regression in previous posts. Now we need to add in resurgence and the distinction between them.

In regression you revert back to previously extinguished behaviors.

In resurgence you revert back to previously reinforced behavior.

This isn’t just semantics. According to Jesús regression and resurgence emerge out of different training strategies and produce different outcomes.

Regression can be defined as: “If the present behavior is not capable of getting reinforcement, one reverts to older forms of response which were once effective, but which have previously been extinguished.” The order in which this unfolds is significant.

Under stress you will revert to an older way of behaving. If that behavior is not reinforced, you’ll go through another extinction process. You’ll revert back to even older behaviors. You’ll keep trying things and trying things, until you either give up entirely, or you are pushed to creativity. This can be a stressful process which is why some people equate creativity with an unpleasant experience. If you were to suggest to them that they take a creative writing class, they would be running for the hills! In their experience there’s nothing fun about being creative. How very sad!

Extinction History
Regression emerges because a behavior which normally earns reinforcement is no longer working. Often we think of extinction as simply a procedure that’s intended to reduce behavior. You don’t like a dog’s barking so you never reinforce it in the hope that the behavior will go away. This simplistic view misses an important key to understanding how to use extinction. A dog that isn’t barking is still doing something. What is the “something” that takes the place of the barking? The behaviors that emerge in an extinction process are not random. Understanding the order lets you master the process.

Jesús described extinction as the mirror image of reinforcement.

Extinction tells you what was reinforced in the past.

Reinforcement tells you what behaviors you are building for the future.

I wrote about this is previous posts. (https://theclickercenterblog.com/2016/11/17/) When you are first learning about clicker training, if your handling confuses the horse and puts him into an extinction process, you are revealing his past. You may see his frustration expressed as pawing, pinned ears, even occasionally biting. Don’t blame yourself for the outburst. You didn’t create the behavior you’re now dodging. Turn your spotlight instead on his past. That’s where the behavior was learned.

The Catalyst, Not the Cause
You may be the catalyst, but you are not the cause. That’s good news. You don’t have to take his behavior personally. The cause sits not in the present, but in the past. It’s only natural to become worried by the emotional reaction you’re seeing. People sometimes inadvertently end up compounding the problem. If their handling skills are clumsy or they don’t yet know how to manage the environment, they can put the horse into even more of an extinction process.

I’ve seen this in beginner handlers. They don’t yet understand how much a lack of clear criteria can impact a learner. Everything starts out so wonderfully. The horse gets clicked and reinforced for touching a target. What fun! But then the handler gets distracted. She misses three or four clickable moments. Those missed clicks can put the horse into an extinction process that leads to emotional outbursts. That’s where video cameras can be so useful. Video helps the handler see the training from the horse’s point of view. It reveals the good tries he’s offering and helps the handler understand more clearly what needs to be reinforced.

The solution to the extinction puzzle lies in embracing clicker training. Through clicker training you’ll be building a repertoire of behaviors that gives the horse alternatives to his old patterns. Instead of reverting back to behaviors you don’t want, now the extinction process will be popping out behaviors you’ve planted, behaviors you like and that you can reinforce. Suddenly, you aren’t in an extinction process anymore. You’re back on track with high rates of reinforcement.

This will take bit more unraveling of the extinction puzzle to understand.

Coming Next: Extinction Reveals the Past

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September 16, 2016 by theclickercenter

Questions

JOY FULL Horses: Ten Things You Should Know About Cues: Number 9.) You Can’t Not Cue: Part 8 of 12

More Questions
In the previous posts I looked at the components that go into creating clicker “super glue”. This discussion brings us back to questions, and that’s getting us closer to returning to Poco, the ear-shy horse I introduced you to at the beginning of this unit.

There are many threads that weave through my work. What is common to all of them are questions. In the sciences you are trained to ask questions. You aren’t there simply to regurgitate to others what is already known. Your role is to explore, investigate and expand upon what is already known.

In archaeology a portion of a site that is being excavated is set aside for a future generation to uncover. The belief is that the methods of exploration will advance, opening up the possibility that more can be learned by waiting for those techniques.

The expression: “we are standing on the shoulders of giants” holds true in every field. Sometimes we may laugh at what people before us have believed. We may think, what an absurd notion! How could people possibly have believed that!? But those absurd notions were the stepping stones that brought us to our current understanding. And the beliefs that we hold today are simply more stepping stones taking us to the next “greatest thing since sliced bread”.

Jaak Pansepp identified seven core affective systems. (Refer to Affective Neuroscience: Published Jan. 17, 2016: https://theclickercenterblog.com/2016/01/17/)

The SEEKING system was one of the seven, and it turns out it plays a role in the other six. We cannot help but be curious and exploratory. It is built into the ancient networks of our brain. As Panksepp describes it, “an infant SEEKS with no set goal.”

Creativity is a core driver. We ask questions because we are curious. We want to know what sits beyond the horizon whether that horizon is the physical or metaphorical. We SEEK to know more.

Questions can take us out past the horizon line, and they can also take us inside to an exploration of our private space. Here the questions become even more important because we cannot directly investigate these private realms.

Levels of Analysis
Panksepp asks questions at the level of individual neurons and the systems that they form within the brain. I have been trained to ask questions at a different level of analysis. That’s a phrase I learned from Dr. Susan Friedman. (behaviorworks.org) Dr. Friedman is a behavioral analyst. She uses a wonderful metaphor of a viewing scope. What is the lens focused on – the distant horizon or something much closer? What is the level of analysis that interests you?

My focus is on balance, but I have to go inside to find the answers to the questions I ask.

Going Inside
What does going inside mean? If I ask you to raise your arm, I have an overall understanding of how human anatomy works and what muscles, bones, and tendons are involved, but that doesn’t tell me how YOU lift your arm.

I could watch what you do, but that gives me only partial information. I could ask you directly, but how many of us know how we do something so basic? We lift our arms without thinking about HOW we are doing it.

So if I want to know how YOU lift your arm, I need to ask questions at a different level of analysis. I might rest my arm on your shoulder so I can add the tactile information to all the other data I’m been collecting.

I will need to know how to silence all the other answers I’ve gotten from asking similar questions of others. I can’t assume that your answer will be the same as theirs. I ask my questions without knowing the answer.

I observe without judgment.

And I observe through questions.

I feel the movement of your arm lifting under my hand. I could be satisfied with thinking:

Here it lifts. Here it stops. Here her shoulder moves. Here her breath is held.

Instead I want to keep putting a question mark at the end of each of these sentences.

How is she lifting her arm? Is it anything to do with what I feel under my hands? How does her arm move? Where does the movement begin? Where does the movement stop? Is it the same on both sides?

Adding a Question Mark – Feldenkrais Work
Turning your observations into questions comes via Mia Segal, a Feldenkrais practitioner. I wrote about her work earlier. (See Part 2: Unit 3, Chapter 3: Feldenkrais Work: Published June 9,2016:https://theclickercenterblog.com/2016/06/09/)

In the horse world many of us are aware of the Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement method because of Linda Tellington-Jones. Her TT.E.A.M training evolved out of Moshe Feldenkrais’ work for people. Feldenkrais’ work is an exploration of movement in which an individual is guided through questions towards greater self-awareness and well being.

Asking Not Telling
Applied to horses what evolves out of this type of exploration is a question that slices straight through to your core belief system. It is this:

Are you telling or are you asking?

You can train with a clicker and treats, but if you are telling, you aren’t playing, and you most certainly aren’t listening.

Suppose you want your horse to pick up a hind foot. You can use your clicker and treats to “tell” him to do what you want.

“Shift your weight over off your left hind.” Click then treat.

“Unweight your left hind.” Click then treat.

“Unweight it a bit more.” Click then treat.

“Pick up your left foot.” Click then treat.

“Pick it up higher.” Click then treat.

“Hold it still while I clean your foot.” Click then treat.

You’ve been polite, but you’ve still told your horse what to do. You’ve picked his foot up, and you’re holding it where you always hold a horse’s foot. But suppose for this horse’s conformation that means his hock is now under pressure.

The longer you hold his foot up, the more uncomfortable he’s going to become. He’ll start to fuss and try to pull his foot away. You’ve been told you have to hold on. If you let go, he’ll learn he can pull away, and he’ll never hold his foot up for you. So you hold on.

He becomes more uncomfortable and pretty soon your wrestling match has disintegrated into a full out battle. No matter the outcome neither of you are winners because the whole process could have been so very different. Here’s how:

Suppose you ask for his foot instead through a series of questions. Now it becomes:

“How do you shift your weight over off your left hind?” Click then treat as he responds with an answer.

“Can you unweight your left hind?” Yes. Click then treat.

“Can you unweight it a bit more?” Yes. Click then treat.

“How do you pick up your left foot?” Follow his movement through the lift. Click then treat.

“Can you pick it up higher?” Yes. Click then treat.

“Where can you comfortably hold your foot?” Click then treat as you find the spot together.

As you ask these questions, you’ll be listening to your horse. You’ll feel how his leg unfolds as he lifts it into your hand. Instead of holding it in a position that stresses his joints, you’ll let him show you where he can hold it comfortably. Instead of fussing, now you have a horse who knows he’ll be listened to.

The click and the treat helps to guide him through the questions you’re asking. The questions will give you the lesson.

The Questions – The Lesson
The Questions:

How do I feel it in my hands?

Where does the movement begin?

Where does it stop?

How does it stop?

When does it stop?

How does it begin again?

What changes with repetition?

Is it the same on both sides?

What changes under my hands?

How could it be done differently?

(Note: These questions are from Mia Segal’s youtube video: The Art of the Question.)

Your Homework
Here’s something to play with over the next few days. Put question marks at the end of your training requests, and then make note of the changes you see in your horse. I’ll end with a question. What changes in your relationship as you ask questions and learn to listen deeply for the answers?

Coming Next: The Teachers We Get Are The Teachers We Need

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June 28, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOYFULL HORSES: TRANSFORMING HORSE TRAINING INTO PLAY

In the previous sections I used the image of a runway to teach a horse to step on a mat. The point of using this image is to get you thinking creatively, with imagination. That’s what takes you far, far away from the mind set of do-it-or-else training.

Transforming Horse Training Into Play
We’ve all watched skilled trainers, whether in person or on video. I’m sure you’ve taken in a variety of images of how things are done. Now suppose you’re handed a horse who is pushy, or won’t stand still for saddling. You’ve seen how professional horse trainers deal with this in what often seems like no time at all.

It’s so easy to put on their “hat” and fall into the same-old, same-old of traditional horse training solutions. But remember – when you are watching one of those skilled trainers, you aren’t just watching fifteen minutes of training. You are watching fifteen minutes plus fifteen years. That’s a lot of experience – and a lot of mistakes made and lessons learned – to get to the point where things look easy.

Easy isn’t the only criterion we’re looking for. I remember watching a video of a trainer who was working with what was described as a “lazy” horse. The owner wanted to be able to lunge the horse, but her horse stayed in close to her and wouldn’t move out. There are all kinds of reasons why a horse would lock in close to a handler. One might be that the horse has learned that staying in close is the safest place to be. If that was the case for this horse, the trainer took his safety away. He charged into the horse with his lunge whip, sending the horse leaping away to the side.

The trainer was using negative reinforcement. His timing was excellent. As soon as the horse was in motion, he stopped cracking the whip. But the instant the horse slowed down, he was on the attack again. It took just a couple of turns around the circle to convince that horse that he needed to keep moving. Easy. The battle was over in just a few minutes.

The trainer stood in the middle of the lunge circle touting the virtues of his technique. The horse continued to trot around him the whole time he was talking to the audience. He no longer even needed to lift his whip. It was an impressive result.

But I was thinking about the lesson from the horse’s perspective. If one of us were trapped in a round pen with someone peppering bullets at our feet, wouldn’t we run? And we’d keep on running until we dropped from exhaustion. If we slowed down, the person in the middle would just need to gesture with the gun to get us running again.

It is the same thing. So easy isn’t enough. I can look at the behavior that emerges – a horse moving at a steady pace around me at liberty and think that’s a fun result. The question becomes: how can I get to that behavior but in a more learner-friendly way? How can I take this, or any other lesson, and turn it into true play for both myself and my horse?

One of the principles that is common to ALL good training methods is this:

There is ALWAYS more than one way to teach every behavior.

If you really believe that and know how to put this principle into practice then this leads you to the answer.

You’re going to break the task down into smaller components so your horse understands what is wanted in each step. You want him to be more than just comfortable with what is being asked. You want him to be eager to play.

Using Props
To teach horses to step on mats, I set out the V runway pattern. The cones help handlers line their horses up with the mat so they have room to come to it on a straight line. When I first taught mats, I didn’t put the cones out. But then I saw that handlers would leave the mat and cut back around on such a tight turn that the horse had no chance to line himself up again straight to it.

They did the same thing at mounting blocks. If the horse shifted away from the mounting block, they would walk off on a tight circle that gave the horse little opportunity to come in straight. The missing step was the handler’s ability to visualize the path she needed to take to give her horse the most success.

So I set out the V shaped line of cones. The length of the “runway” obliged the handler to go out far enough so that she had room to line her horse up to the mat.

I could have set the mats out in a parallel lines. Then I would have had a different kind of runway, and I would have used different images to describe it. It might have become the catwalk for a fashion show. The horse would be a model sashaying her way down the runway – stopping periodically to show off her costume.

Instead I set them out in a V so the handler would have a wide funnel entrance and a better chance of getting the horse into the top of the runway. It’s only experienced pilots and co-pilots who can successfully enter into the top of a narrow runway. Novice teams need the wider opening.

Playing with Images
Playing with images takes you away from relying solely on the standard-issue horse training approaches you may already know. It puts you into a creative place where you can come up with your own patterns, images, and techniques that work for your horse.

People often feel that they have to follow exactly the instructions given by a clinician or riding instructor. I offer the runway as a starting point. I suggest that you begin with my image. Understand how this process works; learn the basics of good rope handling; see what it gives you when you have a horse who welcomes the information the lead provides; and then become creative. Invent your own images to help teach the skills your horse needs to meet your personal training goals.

Creativity
For me, there’s no better indicator of success than hearing from someone that they have found a new way of teaching a familiar lesson. They don’t go about it exactly the same way I do. Their horse has shown them a different way, just as my horses often show me new ways to teach old things.

Creativity is at the core of our being. When a handler clutters up her work space with cones, empty supplement containers, bags of shavings, and who knows what else, and sees in that clutter a better way to teach a lesson, I know she has understood the greater game. She is becoming creative and inventive. She is creating new games. For both horse and handler it has become true play.

Robin with shavings 2016-06-22 at 5.54.53 PM

You might not want to put quite so many shavings bags into your “play ground”, but clutter can definitely contribute to creative ideas.

Coming Next: Unit 4: Cue Communication

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June 8, 2015 by theclickercenter

5GoToSea: Part 15: Micro Masters

Resurgence and Regression: Understanding Extinction So You Can Master It

From a presentation given by Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz during the 2014 Five Go To Sea Conference cruise.

Part 1: The Elevator Question
Part 2: The Translation to Horses: Is Personality Expressed or Suppressed?
Part 3: Unraveling the Regression Mess
Part 4: Extinction and Shaping
Part 5: Extinction Reveals The Past
Part 6: Accidental Extinction
Part 7: Emotions
Part 8: Training With High Rates Of Reinforcement
Part 9: Cues and Extinction
Part 10: PORTL
Part 11: Mastering Extinction
Part 12: Creativity Explored
Part 13: Degrees of Freedom
Part 14: The Positive Side of Resurgence
Part 15: Micro Masters

If you have not read the previous installments of this series, I suggest you begin with Part 1. Part 1 was published on May 21, 2015.

Part 15: Micro Masters

The “Pose”
Jesús closed his presentation with two horse examples. The first was Robin’s “pose”. I’ve told the story of the “pose” many times. I’ll keep it brief here. Robin first learned a stationary “pose”. It originally was a by-product of cleaning up his treat taking manners when he was two years old. During the process he started “posing”, arching his neck and looking like a very pretty dressage horse. I liked the look so I continued to reinforce it. It became a default behavior. In the absence of any other active cue from me, if Robin posed, I would click and reinforce him. I became the cue for the behavior.

Offering “the pose” meant that if Robin wanted to interact with me and engage in the clicker game, he had a sure fire way of doing so. Even if I was busy doing barn chores, if I saw him posing, I would click and reinforce him. I never wanted him to feel like the proverbial toddler who is banging the kitchen pots and pans to get his mother’s attention. If Robin wanted attention from me, he had a behavior which he could use to satisfy his need for social interaction.

Because Robin wasn’t ignored, he didn’t go through an extinction process. I didn’t see a regression into the unwanted behaviors that macro extinctions can cause. Instead I was able to reinforce a behavior I liked, one that was a useful warm up for our formal training sessions. For his part Robin was confident that I would engage with him when he asked for attention.

Reinforcing him for the stationary pose went on through the winter. I didn’t have any plans for developing the behavior. It was simply something I liked. It was Robin who was the creative one!

It must have been late March. I was lunging him in the arena one evening. He was giving me a ho hum trot. There was nothing there I could reinforce. Robin went once around the circle, twice, three times without reinforcement. Normally I would have been clicking and reinforcing him at a much higher rate, but given the plow horse trot I was presented with, there was nothing there I wanted to say yes to.

At the time I would not have described it in these terms, but I was putting him into an extinction process. I could see him searching, trying to decide what to do. On the third time round he had the answer. He would try his pose. But in order to pose and still stay in the trot, he had to add energy. Within one stride he transformed into magazine-cover magnificence. I captured the moment with a click and the rest is history. The “pose” has evolved into a major component of my work. Robin showed us that we could indeed shape self carriage. What began as a happy accident for Robin has become a deliberate and very systematically trained behavior in other horses.

Our Creative Horses
When I first told this story to Jesús, he commented that the pose came out because of resurgence. At the time, I didn’t understand the significance of what he was saying, but I remembered what he said. And Jesús remembered the story. It got him thinking about the procedure and how we might use it to make deliberate use of resurgence. The result: we now have a systematic way of creating unlikely behaviors. The end result can look like magic, but there is good science behind it. Here are the steps:

First, you build a strong history of reinforcement for the component behaviors.

Next, you change the situation somewhat so extinction comes into play.

This generates a resurgence of previously reinforced behaviors. The result: new combinations emerge. That’s creativity. The most fun for me is seeing what the horses invent. They are often so much more creative than their human partners!

Seeing Familiar Landscapes with Fresh Eyes
Kay Laurence might say we are seeing familiar landscapes with fresh eyes.

Jesús would say you have to understand the process of extinction so you can master it. If you understand it, you won’t be frustrating your animals. Instead, you’ll know how to use extinction to generate complex behaviors.

I would say that monitoring the level of extinction your learner is experiencing is a keys-to-the-kingdom part of good training. I recently spent a couple of days working with a group of horses I have come to know well. One of them is a retired performance horse. Without going into a lot of details, I would describe him as an emotionally fragile horse. He’s easily worried. If he thinks he has the right answer, he’s a superstar, but I always have to be careful how far I stretch him into new behaviors. If he thinks he might get something wrong, he worries. He’s come out of a training environment in which he had to perform correctly or his rider could get seriously hurt. I suspect he was corrected for mistakes which accounts for his worry.

Mastering Micro
This past weekend I was working among other things on this horse’s pose. He’s very much got the idea that he gets reinforced for lifting up through his topline and releasing at the poll. I was holding out for slightly better versions. As I withheld my click, I saw him experimenting. Was it higher with his poll? Was it more lift of his back? What did I want?

The shifts he was giving me represented micro changes. The variations were all within a clickable range. Clicking him for any of these variations would not have been wrong, but I was waiting fractionally to see what else would pop out. I was using micro extinctions to create the next step. And because I was thinking about this in terms of extinction, I was monitoring closely how this related to his emotional level. I did not want him to become macro worried.

We were always just a second or two away from a click so I could let him experiment within a micro extinction without risking the emotional fallout of a larger extinction process.

Micro is so very much the key.

Macro extinctions are painful. Micro extinctions are part of good shaping.

Macro shaping can be frustrating. Micro shaping is elegant.

Macro negative reinforcement is literally painful. Micro is again good shaping.

When you go micro, your learner is always just a second or two away from a reinforceable moment. You can cue another behavior. You can click and treat. Either way, you are saying: “Yes! Great idea!” Micro mastery is what we should be striving for in our training. When you say someone is a great trainer, you are saying he is a Micro Master. In training that’s the “black belt” we should be aiming for.

(Note: this video was taken when Robin was three years old. He was not yet started under saddle. Also, he had never been in side reins or any of the other devices that are commonly used to lunge horses. This beautiful self-carriage was shaped entirely through clicker training. The dressage whips that I’m using serve as targets. They give Robin orientation points that help him maintain his balance relative to me.)

This concludes the report on Dr. Jesús Rosales’ Ruis’ 2014 presentation on Resurgence and Regression given at the Five Go To Sea conference cruise.

For information on the 2015 Five Go To Sea Alaska cruise visit fivegotosea.com

Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com
theclickercentercourse.com

Please note: If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com theclickercentercourse.com

June 7, 2015 by theclickercenter

5GoToSea: Pt 14: The Positive Side of Resurgence

Resurgence and Regression: Understanding Extinction So You Can Master It

From a presentation given by Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz during the 2014 Five Go To Sea Conference cruise.

If you are new to this series, I suggest you begin with Part 1

Part 14: The Positive Side of Resurgence

Building Unlikely Behaviors with Resurgence
Jesús reminded us that nothing is either all good or all bad. We want to use positive reinforcement with our animals because we see it as effective and more humane. But positive reinforcement doesn’t always produce desirable outcomes. In people it can lead to addictions to harmful behaviors such as over eating or gambling.

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.

Jesús again used PORTL to illustrate how this can work. In one video example, a trainer set a toy chair on the table for her learner to interact with. The goal was to get the learner to push the chair over the table the way she might push a toy car. The learner began to interact with the chair, but not in a way that would lead to pushing it. Why? Because history matters. The learner is going to bring back all of her history, all of her previous repertoire of chair behaviors as she experiments. Pushing it like a car is very unlikely because that’s not how she would have interacted with this kind of object in the past.

The same would be true if the trainer had set down a dice. The learner would have tossed the dice or shaken it in her hand because that’s in the reinforcement history of that object. Pushing a dice over the table like a toy car would probably be much harder to get.

Instead of trying to shape the behavior through small approximations, the trainer used resurgence. Her first step was getting the learner to touch the chair consistently. The learner in this video was not particularly creative. She touched the chair, but she didn’t try any other behaviors. Getting her to push it was going to be hard.

So the trainer took the chair away and set out a toy car. Using an object that normally would be pushed made it very easy to get the desired behavior. The learner pushed the car over the table top. Click and treat.

This was repeated several times and then the trainer took the car away and set the chair out. The learner went back to touching it. The chair accidentally fell over – click and treat. The learner latched on to that, expanding her repertoire to two behaviors – touching the chair and knocking it over. She persisted in knocking it over even when she did not get reinforced for the action. Everything but pushing it like a car was put on extinction – meaning the trainer no longer reinforced her for these behaviors.

To avoid escalating the learner’s frustration, the trainer took the chair away and set the car out again. The learner immediately started pushing the car over the table top. Click and treat.

To help with the generalization the trainer put a third object out – a small block. The learner pushed the block. Click and treat. This was repeated several times, then the trainer took the block away and set out the car. The car was pushed. Click and treat.

The trainer set the chair out and the learner pushed the chair. Job done.

Resurgence and Dog “Yoga”
Jesús next showed an example of using resurgence to train a dog to step with his hind legs onto a chair.

The dog was taught through a series of very carefully managed steps. First, the dog learned to stand one foot each on four small plastic pods. This alone was impressive training. The pods were the same ones physiotherapists use to help people improve their balance and proprioception. It took great coordination for the dog to stay balanced on the four pods. But that was only step 1. Next he learned to keep his front feet on the pods while he maneuvered his hind feet up onto the brick ledge of a fireplace hearth.

This was not done as a cute party trick. The dog’s owner is a yoga teacher. Her interest was very much the same as mine – helping her animal to maintain a healthy spine.

Generalization and Creativity
Jesús commented that if we didn’t know about resurgence we would be saying the dog generalized. But generalization had nothing to do with it. What we were seeing was resurgence. Kay added that for her this process is what is meant by creativity. It isn’t waiting and waiting for the dog to do something new. Instead we give them a whole range of behaviors, and they come up with a new or unlikely combination. What Jesús was showing us was a procedure for setting up the creative process. You give the animal the repertoire, the components of more complex behaviors, and then you set up a puzzle and let extinction be the catalyst for solving it.

Coming soon: Part 15: Going Micro

Please note: If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com theclickercentercourse.com

June 6, 2015 by theclickercenter

5GoToSea: Pt. 13: Degrees of Freedom

Resurgence and Regression: Understanding Extinction So You Can Master It

From a presentation given by Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz during the 2014 Five Go To Sea Conference cruise.

If you are new to this series, I suggest you begin with Part 1.

Part 13: Degrees of Freedom

Optimistic Puzzle Solvers
How do you help horses and handlers to become more optimistic puzzle solvers? One way is to expand the repertoire of both the handler and the learner. The broader and more extensive the repertoire, the more options an individual has. If a horse knows only two choices and neither of them are working, he’s in trouble.

Jesús referred to this as being coerced by your repertoire. Here’s the example: suppose a high school student is a great debater. In fact he’s so good, he’s captain of the debating team. You’d expect someone like that to have a really high self-esteem. He’s so successful how could he not?

But look a little closer, and you’ll see why. This individual is great at debating, but he’s no athlete. He’s left out of a lot of other school events. He doesn’t play sports. He doesn’t go to school dances. He has poor social skills so at lunch he’s off by himself.

Yes, in debating he wins all the prizes, but he has only that one skill. So he’s being coerced into improving his debating skills because that’s all he can do. He’s the best debater in the school, but that doesn’t keep him from feeling left out and miserable. With only that one skill he has only one degree of freedom.

Other members of the debating team may not be as good as he is, but they are also involved in other school activities. Compared to him they have three or four degrees of freedom, and they are much happier.

The captain of the debating team is the best, but he’s been coerced into that position because he has no choices. For him, as well as for our horses, the way to improve his emotional well-being is to expand his repertoire so he has more reinforcing activities available to him.

Kay Laurence confirmed this approach for dogs. If you’re working with an aggressive dog, you want to expand his repertoire. Teach him a dozen new behaviors: turning your head to the left, to the right, lifting a paw, walking in a circle, touching a target, etc.. Now in a threatening situation he has a dozen new ways to respond, instead of just the two or three that he started with.

Being Emotional Is Being Alive
Jesús dropped in another gem at this point by reiterating that when we talk about emotional behavior such as aggression, we are forgetting that we are always emotional. It isn’t that now we are happy, and then a switch turns off and we feel nothing.

“Living is being emotional.”

The nature and intensity of the emotions fluctuates. We experience different degrees depending upon conditions and our reinforcement history. But thinking in terms of “emotional behavior” is too simplistic. Emotion is part of all behavior. It is not separate from it.

Traveling helps you to understand how much our emotions are a product of the habit patterns that have formed within our familiar environments and how universally present emotions are. Perhaps you are one of the huge number of people who have more to do than you could possibly accomplish in one day. You have a family to care for, a house and barn to maintain, horses to feed and clean up after – not to mention ride. All that and then there’s also an overfull schedule at work. You’re always under stress, but it’s become so the norm, you don’t pay much attention to how you’re feeling. A mildly stressed state is the normal background.

And then you treat yourself to the Five Go To Sea cruise where everything is different. You still have a full day, with more to do and see than any one person could possibly squeeze into a day, but your normal triggers aren’t there. The phone isn’t ringing. You aren’t on the internet with the constant influx of work-related emails. Your co-worker’s voice coming through the office wall isn’t annoying you. All those triggers are gone and now you get to experience who you are and how you feel without them. You become acutely aware of just how stressed you’ve been now that you’ve stepped out of your normal habit patterns and can experience the contrast. You’re still emotional, but now the environment is set up to trigger the kinds of supportive, pleasant emotions you want to experience.

That’s the kind of positive environment I want to create for my learners: one in which puzzle solving is fun, and both horses and handlers eagerly seek it out.

On a Caribbean cruise what do clicker enthusiats do for fun? They play PORTL games.

Coming Soon: Part 14: The Positive Side of Resurgence

Please note: If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com theclickercentercourse.com

June 5, 2015 by theclickercenter

5GoToSea: Part 12: Creativity Explored

Resurgence and Regression: Understanding Extinction So You Can Master It

From a presentation given by Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz during the 2014 Five Go To Sea Conference cruise.

If you are new to this series, I suggest you begin with Part 1.

Part 12: Creativity Explored

Creativity Explored
Do you have a training-related question? Are you wondering which teaching strategy will work the best? Are you puzzling over some element in learning theory? Great. Design a set up, test it a few times to work out the procedure and then invite your friends over for a pizza and PORTL party. In the course of an evening you’ll be well on your way to answering your questions, and you might even have collected data to write a scientific paper!

I do like the new name that’s been given to this shaping game, PORTL: Portable Operant Research and Teaching Laboratory. As Jesús pointed out, we’ve been using lab rats to learn about human behavior. Now we are doing the reverse. We’re using humans as a model for animal behavior. Turnabout is fair play. Much better to frustrate an undergrad than some poor lab rat!

So how does this help us? Jesús shared several examples where extinction strategies were used to train complex, creative behaviors.

What Is Insight?
The first used a great video from Robert Epstein’s work. Epstein was B.F. Skinner’s last graduate student. They were exploring the concept of “insight”. How do we solve puzzles? Are we truly creating something that has not existed before, or is creativity a product of combining known components to solve a novel puzzle?

To explore this question Epstein taught a pigeon three component behaviors: pecking a banana, climbing on a box, and pushing the box towards a target.

The pigeon was then put into chamber with the box and the banana. The banana was hung up out of reach. The pigeon couldn’t reach the banana to peck at it, so an extinction process began. There was a resurgence of previously trained behaviors. The pigeon began pushing the box, but it was very clear the behavior was deliberate. The pigeon pushed the box under the banana, hopped up on the box, and pecked the banana. Puzzle solved.

So here’s the question: what is insight? What really is creativity?

Jesús would say this kind of complex puzzle solving was achieved through resurgence. Set up the underlying components well, add in a bit of extinction, and “creativity” pops out.

If you leave out one of the components, you have to extend the extinction process and hope the subject really does become creative. But this is the kind of creativity that is truly stressful. It’s much better to analyze the complex end-goal behavior, break it down into all of it’s component tasks, and then train each of the components separately. The result will be brilliant looking pigeons that solve in minutes what we might otherwise think would be an impossible puzzle for them.

Inventors and Creators
Jesús’ comment was there is “nothing new under the sun”. You are not going to do anything that you haven’t already done before. All the components of what appears to be a novel behavior have been trained in the past. When individuals experiment and find the usual, familiar things aren’t working, some will give up. Others will keep trying until they come up with a novel combination that works.

We call these people inventors and creators because they are able to find these novel combinations. That first learning process can be a painful one, but once the new combination is worked out, it’s easy for others to copy the results.

I can absolutely relate to this. Give me a horse puzzle to solve, and I can be very persistent. My life experience has taught me that persistence pays off. But put me in front of a computer that isn’t cooperating, and I shut down fast. There my experience has produced very different expectations. I’ve experienced too many situations where errors in a software program have made a problem unsolvable, at least for my level of computer skills. I don’t have the component skills that make wrestling with a software issue fun. Extinction has gone too far and been too uncomfortable. So in one situation I can be very persistent and creative. In another I’m the one going through the classic cycle of an extinction shut down.

I know first hand both how much fun the creative process can be when the expectation of success is there. And I also know how painful and unpleasant the extinction process is when that expectation is missing. So here’s the question: which one are you creating for your horses, your dogs, your children – for yourself?

Coming soon: Part 13: Degrees of Freedom

You can watch the pigeon experiment in this video clip:

Please note: If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com theclickercentercourse.com