Ken Ramirez

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5GoToSea: Pt 3: Unraveling the Regression Mess

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. toppic1

This is Part 3 of a 15 Part series.

Part 1: The Elevator Question
Part 2: The Translation to Horses: Is Personality Expressed or Suppressed?
Part 3: Unraveling the Regression Mess

Part 3: Unraveling the Regression Mess

Emitted Versus Permitted Behavior
What are the keys to unraveling the regression mess?

The first is to tighten up your training and learn how to set up the environment so the behavior you want is the behavior that is most likely to occur. Jesús made the distinction between emitted and permitted behaviors.

When behavior is emitted, you are waiting to see what the learner offers.  When behavior is permitted, you set up the environment so the behavior you want is the behavior that is most likely to occur.

If you’re waiting, waiting, waiting for the dog to sit or the horse to step on a mat, you may see lots of experimenting before you get something you want to click.  All that experimenting can end up as part of a chain.  And it could also lead to a regression into previously learned, but unwanted behavior.

With the horses we begin with very simple, easily isolated behaviors such as targeting.

With the horses we begin with very simple, easily isolated behaviors such as targeting.

With the horses we begin with very simple, easily isolated behaviors such as targeting and backing.  We set up the environment so the behavior is likely to occur.  You aren’t surfing an extinction wave of behaviors.  Your horse doesn’t have to do a lot of guessing.  The right answer is obvious and easy.

In those first lessons I have people start out with only twenty treats.  That limits how much training you can do.  Before your horse can get too confused or frustrated, you’re stepping away to get another round of treats.

You’re also using that time while you refill your pouch to assess what just occurred.  That first targeting session is just data collecting. You’re finding out if that’s a good starting point, or perhaps you need to find a different lesson.  A horse that is very shut down, or becomes easily stressed when he’s not told exactly what to do, may need you to start with an even simpler step than targeting.  This is a horse that may need to have the clicker carefully charged first by simply feeding one treat after another.  Once he’s showing interest in the food, you’ll add the clicker in.  Now it’s: click then feed, click then feed.  At this point the click is not yet contingent on a specific behavior. You are simply pairing the click with the food.

Once you think your horse is noticing the click and anticipating the food, you’ll begin to turn the click into a functional marker signal.   You’ll begin to pair it with the behavior.  You’ll pick something easy such as targeting, or perhaps a slight moving of his head away from your treat pouch.  It should be something you know you can get so the transition from charging the clicker to using it is a seamless one.

Designing an appropriate lesson plan is just part of the solution.  You also need to have clean handling skills and good timing.  Clicking late, clicking the wrong thing, clicking because you haven’t clicked for a while – all of these things will confuse your learner and lock in more unwanted behavior.  So work on your handling skills. Practice first, preferably in front of a mirror.  Borrow a friend to be your “horse”.  Use your video camera so you can review what you are doing. When your handling is quiet, clean, organized, and second nature, that’s what your training will become – quiet, clean, organized, and second nature.

Broadening the Repertoire
Good handling is part of the solution.  Another is to develop a broad repertoire of behaviors.  The more skills you teach your horse, the more options he’ll have besides aggression. Instead of regressing into aggressive responses, he’ll have other options that work.  This is where trust the process begins to make sense. We’ve all read the stories.  Someone has been struggling with a horse, not seeing much progress, and then the pieces all fall into place.  Instead of snapping at his handler, he’s backing up politely and dropping his head.  Instead of pulling away, he’s offering beautiful lateral flexions.  The older repertoire is still there. Given the right triggers, you might still see him regressing back into “childhood”, just as that professor regressed back when she was trapped in an elevator.  But you’ve given him more tools.  That broader repertoire gives him more options. He’ll regress back to head lowering not aggression.

There were many more gems in Jesús’ talk, but this was a good one.  I’ll stop here for now and let you enjoy it.

Coming Soon: Part 4: Extinction and Shaping

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

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5GoToSea: Pt. 2: The Translation to Horses

Resurgence and Regression: Understanding Extinction So You Can Master It

aftercruise1From a presentation given by Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz during the 2014 Five Go To Sea Conference cruise. 

This is Part 2 of a 15 Part series.

Part 1: The Elevator Question
Part 2: The Translation to Horses: Is Personality Expressed or Suppressed?

Part 2: The Translation to Horses: Is Personality Expressed or Suppressed?

Personality Expressed or Suppressed
In the opening of his presentation on regression and resurgence Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz defined regression and gave some examples in terms of human behavior.  I ended yesterday’s post with this statement:

Extinction reveals our history.roman ruins

How does this translate to horse training?  At the very beginning of clicker training the extinction process may reveal your horse’s training history. It helps us to understand the “childhood” our horses have had.  Did your horse have a fair introduction to people, or are there issues you need to know about?

In most cases when you introduce a horse to the clicker, it’s smooth sailing.  The horse quickly figures out the game. You may have to go through a little bit of explaining around the food, but for most horses this moves along without any major hiccups.  You hold a target up, he investigates it, click, you give him a treat.  Easy. Unless he’s one of the horses who has been punished for showing any self-expression.

If your horse has learned that being “well behaved” means he doesn’t offer any behavior you haven’t asked for, he’ll be good at following orders, but not taking the initiative. In fact your “well-behaved” horse may have learned that offering behavior is dangerous.  The best way to avoid punishment is to wait to be told what to do. This is why I put well-behaved in quotes.  Is he well behaved in the way a clicker-trained horse can be?  Or is he simply not offering much in the way of behavior?  There’s a huge difference.  In the first, the personality is expressed.  In the later, it is suppressed.

When you hold out the target, a suppressed horse may be stuck for answers.  He doesn’t know what you want. The “right answers” that normally work don’t seem to apply in this new situation.  This horse is being presented with a puzzle that can make him feel very uneasy.  In the past guessing wrong has meant being punished.

Extinction Reveals the Past
At first this horse may try offering the one or two things that might possibly fit this situation. When those don’t work, he’ll become aggressive. He’s going to protect himself from the punishment he’s knows is coming when he doesn’t respond right away.  Your “well behaved” horse is suddenly charging you with teeth bared.  It’s easy to blame clicker training or the treats for this sudden turnaround in behavior, but I’ve always seen it very differently.  I’ve always said that what is happening is the training history of the horse is being revealed.  Jesús’ talk confirmed this.

Often what we refer to as “well behaved” horses are really horses whose behavior and personality have been shut down through the use of corrections.  They have learned to wait to be told what to do.  Offering behavior, expressing their personality has been punished.  Give them a command they know, and they will respond promptly.  They can seem like the perfect horse.  Safe, easy to direct.  But put them into a situation where they don’t know the answer – in dodo birdfact they really don’t even understand the question – and you will begin to see the extinction process unfold.  Extinction follows a predictable pattern.  These horses will take you back through the stair steps of how they have been treated, and often the story they tell is not a pretty one.

When a horse is not sure of the “safe” answer, he’ll begin to regress back through his training history.  You will see the behavior that has been “swept under the carpet” by suppressing it with corrections.

How do you avoid this regression back into unsafe behavior?  The early steps of clicker training are very structured.  I make use of protective contact so the horse is free to interact – or not.  This lets me see what kind of a learner I have so I can tailor those early steps to the individual. I design my lessons around very small steps so I can keep the training loop clean.  That doesn’t just mean that the horse performs the intended behavior.  Everything matters.  How he takes the treat matters.  How long he hesitates before beginning a new cycle matters.  How quickly he performs the desired behavior matters.  These all tell me something about the emotions he’s experiencing and those definitely matter.  My goal in this first foray into clicker training is to avoid the kind of uncertainty that leads to frustration and a regression back through older learning patterns.

Details matter – especially in shaping.  Jesús showed a couple of video examples of shaping where the loop was not kept clean.  In one a dog was going to be reinforced for coming back to the handler away from distractions.  While the instructor was explaining the lesson, the dog’s handler was listening to her, not paying attention to her dog.

The dog started surfing through all the behaviors that had been reinforced in the past. What should he do to get his person focused back on him?  He started with head bobs, moved on to sitting, then a play bow into lying down and finally he started jumping up on his person.  These were all behaviors that had previously been reinforced, sometimes unintentionally.

The instructor finished describing what she wanted the handler to do, and the formal “session” began.  The instructor deliberately distracted the dog while the handler tried to call him away.  The dog returned fairly promptly to his handler, but the behavior included a sit into a play bow followed by the dog lying down, then jumping up on the handler.  So yes, the dog did indeed return to the handler, but the recall now included these other unwanted behaviors.

This is why I stress so much how important it is to pay attention to details.  When you are first starting, it can be hard to keep track of everything, but details matter.  Yes, you can get your horse touching targets.  Yes, you can have a lot of fun. Yes, clicker training can be very easy.  But if you aren’t being attentive to details, you can miss a lot of important signs that your horse may not be fully understanding this new game.  If your horse isn’t sure what is wanted, you could see a regression through his past training history.  He’ll be telling you what he thought of how he’s been treated, and often the tale is not a pretty one!

When you are brand new to clicker training, and especially if you are also new to horses, this can be a hard dynamic to understand.  What you hear about clicker training is how much fun it is, how much horses enjoy it.  So you give it a try. But instead of smooth sailing, your horse falls apart.  Instead of having a wonderful time, you’re dodging teeth.  You’ve been promised a dream horse, and all you have is a nightmare.  Of course, you blame clicker training and all of the treats you’re feeding for the horrible behavior you’re seeing.   But what can you do?  You don’t want to go back to punishment-based solutions.  You keep hearing from others that you need to trust the process, so that’s what you do.  You continue on determined to solve the riddle of your horse’s regression into nightmare behavior.

Coming tomorrow: What it means to trust the process: Unraveling the regression mess.

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

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Resurgence and Regression: Five Go To Sea Conference Presentation

It’s been just over a year since the first Five Go To Sea conference cruise.  Kay Laurence organized it to celebrate her 60th birthday.  She invited Ken Ramirez, Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz and myself to participate in a five day adventure in the Caribbean.

Alex tells the best stories

Planning for our Caribbean adventure during the winter Clicker Expo: note the snow in the background. We were definitely looking forward to the April cruise.

If you’re counting, that’s four.  Five referred to the each of the conference attendees who joined us.  The reference goes back to Enid Blyton’s series of children’s books: “The Famous Five” and the many adventures they went on.

 

Five go to sea banner

 

my-roomfrom-outsideAdventures we certainly had.  This was my first time on a cruise ship, my first time on the open ocean, my first time in the Caribbean.

ocean view from ship

For me, it was the perfect mix of intense learning and holiday adventure.  We spent our days at sea engaged in the conference. Each evening from the top deck we watched the sun set over the ocean while we played the learning game PORTL.  That was followed by more conversations at dinner in one of the many restaurants the cruise ship had to offer.

jrr-teaching

Jesús and the son of one of the conference participants deeply engaged in a PORTL learning experience. Note: Jesús is the one being “trained”.

 

On excursion days we headed off to explore the Islands we stopped at.  People went snorkeling with sea turtles and dolphins.  Kay took a group Segwaying through the historic district of one of our ports of call.  I joined Ken one evening to go zip lining through the treetops of a tropical forest.

I returned home with a notebook bulging with notes.  Our days had not followed the usual format of conferences where you have rigid time schedules: this lecturer is presenting from 10:00 to 11:00, and then he has to stop so another speaker can begin. No, this conference was centered around the ideas we were presenting and the questions people had.  The schedule was flexible.  We could give each topic the time it needed.  If we found a gem that needed mining, we took the time to explore it.  We could each contribute, ask questions of the other presenters, add our own take on the subject.  What evolved through this more relaxed format was an amazing exchange of ideas.
My notebook was stuffed full of page after page of things I wanted to think about further.  For me the highlight of the conference was Jesús’ talk on Regression and Resurgence. I had first heard him give this talk at the Clicker Expo during the winter.  During the cruise, it was my number one request.  I wanted to hear that talk again.  Because we had the luxury of time, Jesús expanded beyond what he had presented at the Expo to give us a much deeper understanding of the subject.

Jesús with two of the conference participants enjoying the perfect setting to discuss training questions.

Jesús with two of the conference participants enjoying the perfect setting to discuss training questions.

To help process everything he covered, when I got home, I wrote a detailed report on this presentation for my on-line course.  In it I described both what Jesús had covered and then I related each topic directly to horse training.  If you work with other species, I think you will find that the translation is still relevant.

Posts of this sort are read, enjoyed, and used at the time they are written, and then they get buried under the mountain of other posts that come into our in-boxes. Almost every day I will read questions from people that make me think about Jesús’ talk.  His material adds so much depth to our understanding of how shaping works.  It is fundamental to our understanding of the training. His talk shouldn’t be buried in the archives of a computer. It needs to have a more public and permanent home, so I am going to post it here in my blog.

It is a long post, some forty pages overall.  That’s much too long for a single blog, so I am going to present it instead like one of Dickens’ novels.  You’ll get it in installments so you can enjoy it one gem, one chapter at a time.

Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com
theclickercenterblog.com
theclickercentercourse.com

fivegotosea.com

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.

This is Part 1 of a 15 Part series.

Part 1: The Elevator Question

 

 

The Elevator Question
elevatorWhat would you do if you were trapped in an elevator?  You’d probably push all the buttons.  You’d bang on the door. You’d call out in the hope that someone would hear you.  But what if none of those things worked?  What would you do then? Would you wait patiently for the help that you know would be coming?  Or would end up huddled in a corner calling out for your mother?  That’s what happened to a professor at a conference in Mexico.  By the time help arrived, she had regressed back to very early childhood behavior.

Our horses sometimes show similar types of regression.  You aren’t reinforcing your horse at your usual rate.  He becomes confused and frustrated.  What do you want? His version of pushing all the elevator buttons is throwing other behaviors at you that you’ve previously reinforced.  He’ll try lowering his head, putting his ears forward, “posing”. When those don’t work, he’ll regress further back.  He’ll nudge your arm. He’ll paw. He may even bite at you.  That got your attention!

Regression reveal’s an individual’s past.  When you’re tired and under stress, how do you behave?  Do you find yourself regressing back and behaving like a cranky teenager – or worse a spoiled toddler who needs to be put down for a nap?  What are we learning about the child that you were?

Regression
In his conference presentations on regression Jesús Rosales-Ruiz helps us understand this process.  He begins with several definitions of regression that are in the scientific literature.  One of the simplest is:

“If the present behavior is not capable of getting reinforcement, one reverts to older forms of response which were once effective.”

In other words under stress we tend to revert to older ways of behaving.  So regression is a product of an extinction process.  When behavior that was being reinforced no longer works, you regress back to previously learned behavior.  When that doesn’t work, you go back another step and then another.

As Jesús said, very tongue in cheek, during the extinction process we see behavior that was modeled in childhood. If one of his students is acting out, he tells them – “Don’t blame me.  Blame your parents.  You’re simply presenting behavior that was modeled for you in childhood.” If you want to learn about family dynamics, watch toddlers.

So extinction can reveal the history of the individual.

Coming tomorrow:  The Translation to Horses

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

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Five Went To Sea and Had a Great Adventure!

Five Go To Sea

Kay Laurence has just announced that registration is now open for the 2015 Five Go To Sea Conference Cruise. This time we’ll be sailing to Alaska. Visit FiveGoToSea.com for more information on next year’s cruise.

After our Caribbean adventure in April of 2014 I wrote a series of posts for my on-line course detailing some of the presentations.  I’ll share some of the cruise gems here, beginning with a description of the ship and the overall cruise experience.

Five Went To Sea and Had a Great Adventure!

I’m back from the Five Go To Sea conference/cruise/adventure.  I’m not sure what to call it.  I think I’ll just settle for amazing!  That describes it the best.

I’m not sure where to begin or what to include in this report.  Going into the cruise I didn’t know what to expect.  I knew cruise ships were enormous, but the Celebrity ship we were on dwarfed anything I had imagined.  I looked up its dimensions.  It’s 127 feet wide and 1047 feet long.  Some people think in terms of football fields.  I translate dimensions into riding arenas.  The ship is twice the width of my indoor arena and more than eight times as long!  Now take those dimensions and stack up 14 floors of guest accommodations, restaurants, theaters, pools, meeting rooms, dance floors, lounges, spas and all the other amenities a cruise ship has to offer, and you’ll begin to get a sense of the size of the ship.  And however big it is from the ground floor up, there’s that much again below to accommodate the crew, kitchens, engines, fuel, water, food storage and everything else that it takes to provide for well over 4,000 people.  My barn looks like a big building sitting by itself on the side of a hill, but it would be easily swallowed up inside the belly of the Reflection.

I know heading into the cruise many people were concerned about being seasick. I can now tell you that yes, you do feel the pitch and roll of the ocean.  Were people sea sick?  On the first day some people were definitely feeling a bit queasy.  The experienced travelers like Ken Ramirez had taken precautions and were wearing motion sickness patches.

What did I experience? I can now say that I loved being out on the open ocean.  Was the rolling of the ship fun?  Absolutely! I loved it!  It felt like riding!  I might have a different tale to tell if we’d been crossing the north Atlantic in a winter gale, but I loved the rolling of the ship.  When you ride, you let the motion of the horse take you.  It’s not about blocking or keeping yourself rigid.  You let your joints follow the forward and up of the horse’s back. The ship was like that.

There’s an exercise I teach called the “four points on the bottom of your feet”.  It’s a Feldenkrais exercise.  You begin by noticing how you move, how you shift your balance as you roll around the four points on the bottom of your feet (inside toe, outside toe, outside heel, inside heel).  How do you shift your balance forward and back, side to side?  How do you send and receive these shifts in balance?

On the first day of the conference I gave a talk that I titled “Questions”.  It was an amalgam of several other talks I’ve given this year.  It included several short video clips that sum up beautifully how I work with horses.  It began with a clip from Mia Segal, a Feldenkrais practitioner.  In it she talks about how she asks questions through her hands.  When she’s working with someone, she doesn’t provide the answers.  She doesn’t tell the person what to do – bend your knees, turn your head this way or that.  Instead she asks questions – how does this feel under my hands?  Where does the movement begin?  Where does it stop?  How does it stop?

In the “Four Points” exercise you are asking those questions of yourself.  Where does the movement begin?  Where does it stop? What blocks it?  What could I release, what could I find that would let me flow more easily around the four points on the bottom of my feet?

The roll of the ship let me explore those questions.  I loved the feel.  The ship would pitch to the side and I would roll with it, catching my balance at the top of the swell and rolling down with it.  I kept thinking how boring it was going to be to be back on land that didn’t roll and sway under my feet.  I loved “riding” the ship.

I suspect the people who were feeling a little “green around the gills” were wishing I would stop grinning like a Cheshire cat each time the ship pitched up over a wave.  There’s nothing so annoying as someone who is having a good time when you’re feeling miserable – especially when what is making you feel sick is the very thing they are laughing about.

I do think it is a great example of we create our own reality.  I went into the cruise expecting to have a great adventure.  I could have stiffened against the pitch of the ship and made myself miserably sick.  Instead I flowed with it and had a grand time “riding”.

I love exploring balance.  On that first day at sea I had a hard time staying balanced.  I could roll around the four points just fine, but I couldn’t stand with my feet together.  I had to keep stepping out wider to catch my balance. There was also no walking a straight line down the endlessly long corridors back to my room.  I swayed from wall to wall looking like I’d just downed a bottle of Caribbean rum.   But a couple of days later, not only could I stand feet together, so could everyone else.  I led the group through the beginning steps of learning to stand balanced over your feet.  On day one this would have been a challenge for all of us.  But on day three of the conference everyone had gained sea legs.

We do create our own reality.  Kay Laurence discovered she likes cruises, so she created this conference cruise to celebrate her 60th birthday.  I’m very glad she did and that she included me as one of the presenters.  It was such good fun, and such a great conference.

Unlike other conferences we didn’t have a set agenda with program titles announced ahead of time.  Instead each of us managed one of the four conference days.  We set the days up in a way that suited our style of teaching.  Every day included formal presentations, but there was also time for questions and discussions.  We each had talks that the others had given that we wanted to hear again.  On the day I managed, I told Jesús I was going to put him to work.  I wanted to hear his talks on resurgence and negative reinforcement again.

I’m not even going to try in this one report to go through all the programs that were presented.  That would make it one of those impossibly long posts that everyone wants to read, but no one really has the time to.  Instead over the coming days I’ll given you some of the “Five Go To Sea” gems, some of the highlights of the presentations, discussions and adventures.

I will just share this.  Going into the cruise the four of us weren’t sure what we were getting ourselves into.  Would a conference work on a cruise ship?  Would the four of us work well together as presenters?  Was it something we felt was productive and worth doing?

On the sixth night of the cruise Kay, Ken, Jesús, and I had dinner together.  Kay asked the question – should we do it again?  The answer was an unhesitating and unanimous “yes”.  We each voiced the same thing.  We would feel very sad if we thought this was the only time we would have a conference like this.  So start practicing the “four points on the bottom of your feet”.  We are planning another “Five Go To Sea” adventure for August 2015.  This time the cruise will take us up the Alaska coastline through some spectacular scenery.  Kay has just announced that the registration is open.  Visit FiveGoToSea.com for details, and come be one of the Five going to Sea in 2015!

Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com

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