December 15, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY FULL Horses: Understanding Extinction: Part 14

Our Creative Horses
Yesterday I shared with you the story of Robin’s “pose”. The use of resurgence has helped us develop a much more systematic way of creating unlikely behaviors. Because we understand the process better, we can be more deliberate in it’s use. I ended the post by saying: “The end result may look like magic, but there is good science behind it.”

When we open up our training in this way and turn our learners into more active participants, we often find that they are even more creative than we are. Once again Robin provided me with a great example of this.

When Robin was three I took him to the Equine Affaire to be my demo horse. I wanted to show people what freeshaping via clicker training looks like. I didn’t want them just to see the end product of freeshaping. I wanted them to see me teach Robin a completely novel behavior. The problem was he already had a pretty extensive repertoire. I was stumped for ideas, but I thought the easiest solution would be to use a prop. One of my clients had been teaching his horse to flip a hula hoop up over his head. I thought I could make a start on that with Robin.

Robin had been our first equine retriever. Picking things up was solidly in repertoire. I figured if I put the hula hoop on the ground, he would try to pick it up. I’d be able to reinforce that and build it into Robin holding it longer which might over three days of demos lead to him flipping it over his head. Such was my level of creativity, that’s all I could think of to work on with a hula hoop.

So during our demo, I brought out the hula hoop and tossed it out on the ground. I was still explaining freeshaping to the audience so I wasn’t focusing yet on Robin. While I was talking, he walked over to the hoop and stood with his front feet planted in the middle of it just as he would have stood on a mat. Before I could respond to him, he reached down, picked up one side of the hoop and began walking himself forward foot by foot with the hoop! That was his level of creativity!

The Creative Process
Here are the steps the horses have been teaching us:

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

You change the situation somewhat so mild extinction comes into play.

You get a resurgence of these previously reinforced behaviors and new combinations emerge. That’s creativity. The most fun for me is seeing what the horses invent. As we have seen, they are often so much more creative than their human partners!

Familiar Landscapes
Kay Laurence might say we were seeing familiar landscapes with fresh eyes.

Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz would say you have to understand the process of extinction before you can master it. If you understand it, you’ll avoid situations that create macro extinction processes and all the frustration that goes along with them. Instead you’ll use micro extinctions to build 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’ve just 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 punished for mistakes which accounts for his worry.

Mastering Micro
His back was looking prematurely aged so I wanted to teach him Robin’s “pilates pose”. I had already shown him that he could get reinforced for lifting his back up and releasing at the poll. In this particular session 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. They were all within a clickable range. Clicking him for any of these variations would have been fine, 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 his emotional responses. I did not want him to become macro worried. We were always just a second or two from a click so I could let him experiment without risking the emotional fallout of a larger extinction process.

Micro Masters
Micro is so very much the key.

Macro extinctions are frustrating. Micro extinctions are part of good teaching.

Macro shaping can be confusing. Micro shaping is elegant.

Macro negative reinforcement is literally painful. Micro negative reinforcement is clear communication. It is a conversation with cues exchanged in both directions.

When you go micro, your learner is always just a second or two away from a reinforceable moment. You can cue another behavior, or you can simply 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 really saying that individual is a Micro Master. In training that’s the “black belt” we should be aiming for.

robin-pg-lying-down-micro-masters

With this last section we come to the end of my JOY FULL Horses book – almost. What remains is one final chapter and that’s what’s coming next.

Coming Next: Doorways

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 4, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY Full Horses: Understanding Extinction: Part 4

Extinction: Big, Small and Accidental

Accidental Extinction
Extinction is not a rarity. Extinction is going on all the time, but we aren’t always aware of it. Suppose you’re working with your horse. Perhaps you’re in the early stages of clicker training and the focus of your lesson is “grown-ups are talking”. You’re walking a few steps, stopping and asking your horse to stand quietly with his nose centered between his shoulders. He’s been doing well. You’re almost done with the session when your cell phone rings. You answer it, taking your attention away from your horse.

Your horse doesn’t realize that you’ve disconnected from him. You haven’t gone through a teaching process to tell him that the ring tone of your cell phone is a cue for him to take a nap. While you are on the phone, you will not be engaging with him. Your horse doesn’t know this, and he doesn’t understand why the flow of your session has so abruptly changed.

He offers you a nice bit of “grown-ups” that meets all the previous criteria, but you aren’t paying any attention. He doesn’t get clicked. He tries harder, maybe throwing in some head lowering. That doesn’t work either so he tries some earlier experiments – some head bobbing, some lip flapping, some gentle nudging, and finally a hard nudge. That gets your attention, but now you’re thinking what an impatient, muggy horse you have!

Your horse is offering “rude” behavior, bumping, nudging your arm, snuffling around your pockets. He’s scrolling through the behaviors that he’s tried in the past. You click something, anything out of desperation.

What you are reinforcing is not just that single moment, but all the scrolling through his repertoire he’s been doing trying to get you to click. You have just locked into your future training all those other unwanted behaviors. It’s going to be very hard to convince your horse to put into moth balls those unwanted segments. They’ve become an instant part of the whole sequence. If the current behavior isn’t working, scroll through all your past mugging behavior. That will get your person’s attention back where it belongs – on you! That’s what he has just learned through that one desperation click.

Case in point: Jesús showed a video of an experienced trainer teaching a dog to retrieve a dumbbell. The dog had been successfully delivering the dumbbell to the handler, but now she wanted to raise the criterion and have the dog place it more firmly in her hands. When the dog did not get reinforced for the usual behavior, he dropped the dumbbell, did a quick head bob, and then picked the dumbbell up again. Just as the handler clicked, the dog sat. Oh oops!

She lowered her criteria. The dog handed her the dumbbell, but now he was also sitting as he did so. Her hand reaching to take the dumbbell had in one click become a cue to sit.

Mini versus Maxi Extinctions
When the dog started offering behavior to get his handler to click, that’s the extinction process at work. We don’t tend to think of it in this way. To develop the behavior we are training we actively want the offering of behavior. Shaping depends upon differential reinforcement. The dog offers a head bob, a paw lift, a sit. We pick and choose among these behaviors. We think of extinction as something separate, something to be avoided. It’s a long drawn out process with lots of painful emotions associated with it.

Jesús wants us to understand that the process can occur in seconds. When you are shaping, you are working with mini extinctions. When learners are offering behavior, they are going through a resurgence process. You don’t have to go hours or even minutes for the extinction process to begin. It happens in seconds.

My ears perked up the first time I heard Jesús talk about extinction in this way. I love this concept of mini extinctions. It fits with microshaping and shaping on a point of contact. All three are learner-friendly because they make use of thin slicing and create high rates of reinforcement.

We looked at Microshaping in previous sections (https://theclickercenterblog.com/2016/11/10/). Kay Laurence stresses that it’s not thin slicing alone that defines microshaping. It is high rates of reinforcement. In microshaping Kay wants a success rate of 98% or higher. To get that you have to be very skilled at setting up the training environment. The learner is not surfing through a long series of behaviors trying to find the one that is “hot”.

Instead the learner is set up to keep giving correct responses. There are very few opportunities for unwanted behaviors to creep in.

Kay contrasts microshaping with what she refers to as sloppy or dirty shaping. Here the handler lets the animal offer behavior after behavior looking for the one that will satisfy the criterion. I’ve always been uncomfortable watching people freeshape in this clumsy fashion. They miss so many opportunities to click because they are looking for too much.

Now Jesús has helped me understand why this type of shaping makes me so uncomfortable. Mini extinctions are part of puzzle solving. But they are mini. Success happens frequently so the frustration level stays low. You could in fact see it as a positive motivator. That little bit of: “is it this or is it that?” leads to a feeling of satisfaction each time you make the right choice.

Contrast that with macro extinction. Now it’s not “this or that, or this other solution either.” In fact nothing you try seems to work. The frustration level rises to a level that takes away the fun. You can see this when you play shaping games with people who are new to training. It’s supposed to be a fun experience, but when the one doing the clicking doesn’t have a clear plan, it’s anything but.

Training Game Mishaps
Suppose you’re the learner in one of these games. The person who is acting as your trainer sets a teacup on the table. You get clicked a couple of times for touching the teacup. Okay, so far so good. The teacup is clearly a “hot” item, but what are you supposed to do with it?

You try turning the teacup, picking it up, turning it upside down. Nothing works. You pretend to drink out of it, you spin it, you hold it delicately with your little finger out, you scoot it over the table. Nothing gets clicked. Your frustration rises in direct contrast to your willingness to play the game. You’re in a macro extinction that can be painful to watch. You go back through the history you have with teacups. What else can you try? Nothing is working. You want to give up or better yet throw the tea cup at your trainer!

This offering of behavior is part of the extinction process. You are experiencing a resurgence of previously reinforced behaviors. In the teacup example, when you were no longer reinforced for just touching the teacup, when reinforcement for that behavior stopped, you tried things that you had done with tea cups or tea cuplike objects in the past. But in this case your trainer is a new shaper. She is outcome oriented, so she is looking for big macro responses. She doesn’t yet know how to set her learner up to give her the small reaction patterns that would lead seamlessly to an end goal. The result is an unhappy and very frustrated learner. Both the learner and the trainer go away feeling unsuccessful, and they both vow never to play the training game again!

Micro Extinctions
When someone is shaping and they want to raise the criterion, they stop reinforcing for a behavior that was just successful. The learner goes through a resurgence/regression process. She begins to offer other behaviors that have worked in the past. People tend to think of extinction as happening over a long period of time, but Jesús kept emphasizing that it happens over seconds. Two to three seconds is all you need for a mini extinction. You’ll begin to see the learner offering behavior other than the one that was just being reinforced.

Again, this got my attention. I don’t like the frustration you see when a puzzle appears to be unsolvable. Shaping shouldn’t be marked by sharp drop offs in reinforcement. I don’t want to see macro extinctions. If reinforcement is that sticky, it’s time to change your lesson plan. Either put the horse away altogether while you go have a think, or regroup by shifting to another activity. If you keep waiting, waiting, waiting until your learner finally gets close to the answer, you could lock in some unwanted behavior, and you will almost certainly lock in some unwanted emotions.

What are some good teaching strategies that help you avoid the frustration of macro extinctions, and that lead you instead to the elegant use of micro extinctions? That’s what we’ll be exploring in the next section.

Coming Next: Using “Hot” Behaviors

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November 16, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY FULL Horses Part 3: How Clicker Trainers Play

Five Go To Sea
If someone had asked me a few years back what the likelihood was of ever finding me on a cruise ship, I would have said you had a better chance of winning the lottery – the real one, not the kind I described in the last section. But in the spring of 2014 that’s exactly where I was. Kay Laurence had decided to celebrate her sixtieth birthday in style. She was going on a Caribbean cruise, but not just any cruise. She invited Ken Rameriz, Dr. Jesús Rosales Ruiz, and myself to join her on a Five Go To Sea conference/cruise/adventure. I’m really not sure what to call it, so I’ll just settle for amazing! That describes it the best.

I’m sure you’ve done the math. Kay, Ken, Jesús and myself make four not five. Number five were all the other conference attendees.

Before I plunge into describing the conference and all that we learned, let me set the stage by describing the ship we were on. Prior to going on the cruise, I didn’t know what to expect. I knew cruise ships were enormous, but this ship dwarfed anything I had imagined. I looked up it’s dimensions. It was 127 feet wide and 1047 feet long. Some people think in terms of football fields. I translate dimensions into riding arenas. The ship was 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 was from the ground floor up, there was 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 this ship.

Most of the 4,000 people who were vacationing on the ship were there for the spas, the theaters and all the other guest amenities. And then there was this rather odd group of clicker trainers who completely baffled the staff. We weren’t sleeping in after a night of partying. Instead we were getting up at the crack of dawn to meet up for a morning t’ai chi and body awareness session. Instead of lounging for hours at a time by the pool or gambling in the ship’s casino, we spent the days at sea in the conference room. That was our idea of fun!

“Riding” the Ocean
I know heading into the cruise many of the conference attendees were concerned about being seasick. I can now tell you that yes, you do feel the pitch and roll of the ocean. Was anyone sea sick? On the first day some people were definitely feeling a bit queasy. 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 the energy 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?

In the “Four Points” exercise you are asking 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 how 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 of the ship. 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.

The Conference
We do create our own reality. Kay Laurence discovered she likes cruises, so she created a conference cruise to celebrate her 60th birthday. She designed a conference like no other. We had overall themes for each day, but we weren’t tied to particular presentations.

Normally at conferences the organizers want to know what you’re going to talk about months ahead of the event. I understand their perspective. They need to advertise the event, but eight months out I don’t know what is going to be inspiring me.

I much preferred Kay’s approach. Creativity comes from combining familiar elements in new ways. All four of us had heard each other speak before. We were familiar with the material that was going to be presented, but in the format of this conference we had so much more time for conversation and discussion. We could expand on ideas presented and adjust our choice of presentations to follow up on topics that were of interest. That meant the impact of the presentations went beyond that of most conferences.

What emerged from those talks was a true Caribbean treasure trove. If you asked each of the participants who went on the Five Go To Sea cruise what the highlight of the trip was, I’m sure you would get dozens of different answers. For some it might be an adventure they had on one of the excursion days. For others it might be a dinner time conversation with one of the speakers. For me I would say the cornerstone of the event was Dr. Jesús Rosales Ruiz’s talk on resurgence. In the previous unit I talked about Kay Laurence’s microshaping. This is very much linked to the concepts Jesús introduced us to in his talk.

Kay wants a 98% or higher success rate. To get to that you need to thin slice your criteria. If you’re sloppy, if you’re waiting for your animal to offer behavior, you will end up with a hodgepodge of clicks. You’ll miss clickable behaviors. You’ll click for a head turn this time and a foot lift the next. Kay calls this dirty shaping.

For both Kay and myself clean, elegant shaping evolves out of microshaping.

Reaction Patterns
Micro. That’s always been the direction I’ve looked. Remember Dr. Susan Friedman’s phrase – level of analysis. (https://theclickercenterblog.com/2016/09/16/) She talks about that in reference to the focus someone has. If you are looking through a Caribbean pirate’s spy glass, are you focused on the distant horizon or the bird that’s skimming across the water just a few feet out from your ship? When you consider why a certain behavior is occurring, are you trying to figure out what part of the brain is activating and what individual neurons are firing? Or are you looking at observable events that surround the behavior which might be effecting the frequency of it’s occurrence?

Levels of focus very much relate to training. You can go macro and be outcome driven and send your horse directly over fences. If you and your horse are bold and athletic enough, you’ll be successful.

Alternatively, you can go micro and look at the reaction patterns that will allow you to jump those fences successfully. (I discussed reaction patterns in the previous post.)

going-micor-text Going macro prematurely can lead to crashes. Going micro will produce the macro outcomes without seeming to work on them directly.

Most of us have been told that we need to walk, trot, and canter our horses in both directions every day for training to advance. But if your horse is out of balance in the faster gaits, practicing them just makes the balance problems more entrenched.

There’s a lovely expression that sits at the core of my training:
“The walk is the mother of all gaits.”

What this means is you can focus on the underlying reaction patterns that lead to great balance in all three gaits without needing to go out of the walk. When you do ask for the trot or canter after a hiatus from these gaits, it will feel as though you have a completely different horse under you.

Extinction
Going micro gives us something else. It allows us to transform the make-it-happen force and violence of traditional horse training into clicker-compatible good technique. It is this transformation that makes true play between horses and humans possible.

To get there we need to look at extinction and the role it plays in shaping. To help us we’re going to return to the Five Go To Sea cruise and sit in on the lecture Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruis gave on Extinction and Resurgence.

So get out your notebook, pull up a chair and join us on the cruise. You’re about to be treated to a gem of a lecture.

Coming Next: Resurgence and Regression

P.S.: We so enjoyed the conference cruises that Kay came up with yet another innovation: a land cruise. We had our first Training Thoughtfully Land Cruise in the UK in January 2016. In 2017 we will be holding our second. This one will be October, 20-22, 2017 in Milwaukee WI.

If you are thinking Milwaukee seems an unlikely place for a land cruise, one of the reasons for picking the locations is Kay and I want to use these conferences to provide a stage for local talent. People often feel that there is no one close to them they can go to for help. These conferences will help connect people to their local training resources. At this conference two of my Click That Teaches coaches, Jen Digate and Natalie Zielinski, will be presenting, along with several dog trainers Kay knows. All of them are local to the Milwaukee area.

Anticipation is a wonderful thing. If you are reading this in November 2016, there is currently an early bird special available for the conference registration. Visit trainingthoughtfullymilwaukee.com for full details.

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November 11, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY FULL Horses: Part 3: Going Micro: Unit 2: Base Behaviors

Base Behaviors
In the previous post I introduced you to Kay Laurence’s definition of microshaping. Often when people are freeshaping behavior, it is very hit or miss training. They are too macro in their shaping plan, resulting in long dry spells between clicks.

Microshaping takes a very different approach. In microshaping you are using very small steps, clear criterion, and well thought out training plans to create a success rate of 98% or better. Base behaviors help to create this high degree of success.

A base behavior is similar to the tap root behavior I described earlier. (Refer to: Cues Evolve: Part 2 published Sept. 1, 2016 https://theclickercenterblog.com/2016/09/01/) Returning to these behaviors over and over again creates a deep history of reinforcement and helps builds the learner’s confidence.

The base behavior is just what the name implies. It is a behavior you keep returning to that serves as the end of one movement cycle and the starting point for the next. Kay will often click as the dog returns to the base behavior, but she will toss the treat out away from the dog. The dog runs to get the treat and then returns promptly back to the base behavior for another click. If you’re clever, – and Kay is – you can build a huge repertoire of reaction patterns using the concept of base behaviors.

A base behavior might be a dog coming to a balanced stop with all four feet on a platform. The dog returns to the platform because he knows he will get clicked. As he lands on the platform, Kay clicks and tosses the treat so the dog must leave the platform to get it. As soon as he gets the treat, the dog returns to the platform to get clicked again.

Kay tosses the treat out very strategically. The path the dog takes to get back to the platform produces the behavior Kay wants. That might be trotting around a cone to get back to the platform. Kay gradually moves the cone out to the side. The dog could by-pass the cone and go straight to the mat, but he’s learning that going out in a wide arc around the cone is part of the behavior.

Another function for base behaviors is they let you bring your learner into stillness so you can draw his attention to a small muscle movement. Kay offers a great example of how this works. Suppose you want to teach your dog to wag his tail on cue. When he’s with you, tail wagging is almost always present, so it may be hard for him to realize that’s what he’s being clicked for. The solution: have your dog lie flat on his side. This is your base position. The rest of your dog is still. Only his tail is moving. As you click each time his tail lifts up off the floor, he’ll begin to realize that’s the desired behavior.

Grown-ups and standing on a mat are two great base behaviors we use with the horses. Both keep the feet still so you can focus on ears forward, the pilates pose, or any other muscle pattern you may be working on.
robin-on-mat-1a
Tossing Treats
With horses we don’t generally toss treats the way you can with dogs. It isn’t that horses aren’t capable of tracking a thrown treat. It’s more that we don’t usually work on the kinds of surfaces that we want horses eating off of. Tossing a treat out into a sand footing raises concerns about sand colics. And the trouble with tossing a treat out into grass doesn’t need explaining.

Kay uses tossed treats to tremendous advantage when she’s working with her dogs. Suppose she wants to teach her dog to back up. She’ll teach this using a mat. Once again, coming to a balanced stop with all four feet on the mat is the base behavior. She clicks, and then tosses the treat out in front of the mat so he has to leave the mat to get to it.

Once he’s got his treat, the dog is going to return to the base behavior. Initially the food is tossed just a step or two away from the mat so taking a step back is the easiest way to return to the mat. Click. The food is tossed out a step or two from the mat and the cycle repeats. The behavior Kay wants is backing. She get this through the strategic use of treats and the return to the base behavior of stopping with all four feet on the mat.

Once the dog is consistently taking a step or two back to get the mat, Kay will toss the treat a little further away. Note, the change she makes is in the distance she tosses the treat. She doesn’t move the mat. The dog knows where it is. He’s learning how to return to it from increasingly greater distances and varied directions. This creates a very confident backer.

Precision
A 98% success rate depends upon precise criteria.

So picture this. Kay has just tossed a treat out in front of her dog. It’s a short toss. He only has to go a step or two forward to reach the food. Returning to the mat means backing up a similar number of steps.

Many of us would watch the front feet, and as soon as they were both on the mat, we would click. And we would be wrong.

We would be clicking an outcome not a behavior. The outcome is the dog standing with all four feet on the mat.

The behavior Kay looks for is the right front steps back onto the mat, followed by the left front stepping back onto the mat – click. That’s precision training.

What is the difference? This level of precision means the same behavior is consistently being marked. In the outcome driven view of the world the dog might back right front, left front this time; followed by left front, right front the next; followed by a half step forward, then right front, left front. Those are three different approaches to the mat. Precision training creates clean, precise results.

Dynamic Food Delivery
We may not be able to toss treats to our horses in the same way that Kay uses them with her dogs, but we can certainly put the concept of strategic treat delivery to work and use it to our advantage. When I’m teaching backing, I turn and walk with my horse as he backs up. After I click, I’ll turn forward and walk as I get the treat from my pocket. I move my feet WHILE I am getting the treat out of my pocket.

I’ll end up exactly where we started when I initiated the backing. This resets the whole behavior so I can repeat that unit over and over again until it is clean and fluid. Then I’ll follow the mantra of loopy training: when a loop is clean, you get to move on. Not only do you get to move on, you should move on.

I’m not asking the horse to back up, click and treat, and then back up again without going forward. That may seem as though it’s the same behavior – backing. To the horse each additional step back is a step into unknown territory. Is he about to step into a hole or onto unstable footing? Is he getting too close to the electric fence or the other horses? Each step presents a new question which means each step is a completely new behavior.

Resetting via the food delivery means I can ask for the same step over and over again, creating a consistent response for this simple reaction pattern. I’m not being outcome driven – backing through a specific pattern. Instead I’m focused on the reaction pattern that will create for me the ability to ask for backing at any time, for any number of desired steps, in any direction and in good balance.

Training via reaction patterns means I can be precise in my criteria. It isn’t any step back I am looking for. It is this foot stepping back. And more than that, I will be watching how the horse lifts his foot. I’ll time my click so I’m marking the upward lift of the foot, not the part of each step where his foot is returning to the ground. I will do this until my loop is clean. At that point it will be time to change criteria and move on to an expanded version of this movement cycle.

The video illustrates how to use strategic food delivery in combination with a request to back. It also illustrates the difference between training for reaction patterns versus outcome. The overall function of this set-up is to teach my horse to back in a square. If I were training with that narrow goal in my sights, I would ask my horse to continue backing around the perimeter of the square. Instead I build the underlying reaction pattern that will make this an easy outcome to achieve.

Precision and Play Go Together
Precision training creates precision results.

This sounds hard. It sounds as though you have to really be focused and thinking every second. Clicker training is supposed to be FUN! How can you play if you have to be thinking every second about which foot is moving and what part of the arc to click in?

Remember that convenience store where all the lottery tickets are printed with winning numbers? You look at your numbers and you’ve won! Hurray! You don’t have to think about what your lucky number is. You don’t have to wonder if your non random numbers look random enough. You can choose the same set of numbers over and over again. Each time you’ve got a winner! Easy!

Your horse steps back onto his mat – left front, right front. You’ve won!

Hand him the food a step or two forward.

He steps back – left front, right front.
You’ve won again!

This is easy. This is child’s play!

Learn to set up behavior, and it truly does become playful because laughter thrives on success. Laughter dies away when there’s confusion. When the clicks are few and far between, when your learner decides he’d rather go sniff the nearest manure pile than interact with you, that’s when play disappears.

Play evolves out of success. Play evolves when both learner and teacher are relaxed and confident in the process. Good technique, attention to detail, attention to your learner’s emotional needs are the breeding ground for play.

Coming Next: Part 3: Going Micro: Patterns

P.S. To learn more about Kay Laurence’s training visit: learningaboutdogs.com

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November 10, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY Full Horses Part 3: Going Micro: Unit 1 – The Many Forms of Micro

This begins Part 3 of JOY FULL Horses. I ended Part 1 by posing the question: what are ten things you would want someone who is new to clicker training to understand about cues? I asked you to make your own list. In Part 2, unit by unit, I shared my answer to this question. How did my list match up with yours?

The exploration of cues took us on quite a journey. In any journey, once you’ve taken in the overall look of a landscape, you can begin to focus in on the finer details. That’s what we’ll be doing in Part 3. We’re going Micro.

The Many Forms of Micro

monty-with-mini Why Micro
Going Micro doesn’t mean we’re all going to take up training miniature horses. Going Micro refers to the level of focus we bring to the training.

At first blush becoming more detail-oriented would seem to be anti-play. It’s easy to visualize a horse cantering through an agility-style obstacle course and think of that as play.

We tend to be very goal oriented. We see someone “playing” tennis, and we think that individual is having fun. But when that individual is a professional tennis player who spent his childhood being forced to practice for hours at a time every day, there is nothing playful in the behavior. It is work, work, and more work. Read Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open, to discover how far from Play this form of forced practice can take you.

HOW something has been taught is much more important than WHAT the behavior is. A horse trotting through a series of obstacles may be doing so because he loves the game. Or he may be trying hard to avoid the sharp lash of his trainer’s whip. In this section we’re going to look at what it means to go MICRO and how that can lead directly to a creative Play state for both the handler and the horse.

MicroShaping
Kay Laurence coined the term MicroShaping. For her it refers to a very specific form of training. The conversation I was having with Poco, the ear-shy horse you met at the end of Part 2, depended upon my being able to ask small questions. In clicker training we often call this thin slicing.

Kay Laurence uses this term in her training, but when Kay talks about microshaping, she doesn’t just mean breaking the training down into super small steps. She means setting the training up so the success rate is 98% or higher.

Yes, you read that correctly. 98%.

If you want a 98% success rate, you need a well thought out training plan. You aren’t waiting, waiting, waiting, hoping that your horse will give you something you want. You are setting up the training environment in such a way that, of course, he presents clickable moment after clickable moment.

It also means you are looking for underlying reaction patterns – not the final outcome behavior.

Outcome Versus Reaction Pattern
When you focus on reaction patterns versus outcome, what difference does it make to your training?

If you want your horse to back up in a square, you won’t simply ask your horse to back up, and then back up some more until you have somehow gotten him around the pattern. (Or more likely trapped in a corner.) That’s being goal driven.

If you are training reaction patterns, you’ll view backing as a movement cycle. Movement cycles are just that. They don’t have a linear beginning, middle and end. Rather the behaviors within the cycle loop back to the beginning point so the whole pattern can occur again. A cycle is not complete until the individual is in position to repeat the entire pattern. Sitting in a chair from a standing position isn’t the complete movement cycle. You’re only half way there. The person needs to stand up again, returning him to a position from which he can sit down. Only then can he begin the next loop in the cycle.

So with backing you’ll begin with a very small unit. You’ll ask your horse to shift his weight slightly back. Click. You’ll feed so that he’s brought forward again. In this way you can keep repeating this small unit. You will know you can expand to the next criterion when it is already occurring on a consistent basis. You’ll end up with a clean, finished behavior because you trained clean throughout.

It’s easy to read fast through this last paragraph and miss completely the significance of what I am saying. Suppose you are reinforcing your horse for standing beside you in the stationary behavior of the “grown-ups are talking”. You want him to keep his head balanced evenly between his shoulders. Check, he’s doing that consistently.

Behavior varies. Doing the same exact thing over and over again just doesn’t happen. Even Olympic athletes, as consistent as they are, show some slight variability performance to performance. So, while your horse is standing beside you, your eye may be caught by the movement of his ear flicking forward. He may have been listening to the sounds of horses moving in a paddock behind him, and that’s why his ears were back. Now something has caught his attention in front of him, and his ear flicks forward to listen. You’ve been focused on his head position. Now that that overall position is becoming consistent, your attention can broaden out to include the flick of his ears.

If his ears were always back, it would be hard to make that the next criterion. If a behavior isn’t happening at all, waiting for some piece of it to pop out can take your learner straight into the frustration of an extinction process. Your learner will begin throwing behaviors at you trying to get you to click. One of those behaviors just might be a flick of an ear, but it’s a messy process. You’re more likely to get pinned ears as he becomes increasingly frustrated trying to figure out what you want. Frustration can lead to a whole lot of behaviors you don’t want. They’ll become unwanted guests attaching themselves at odd times to the desired behavior.

Instead of this form of hit or miss shaping, you’ll wait until the behavior begins to pop out as you consistently reinforce your current criterion. If the new behavior begins to happen often enough for you to notice it, then it is likely that it will happen again fairly soon. So even if you go a tiny bit down the extinction road by withholding your click as the previous criterion occurs, your learner will very quickly land on the right answer. Click then treat. He won’t feel the frustration of an unsolvable puzzle. Instead he’ll experience the pleasure of another successful answer.

Waiting until the next shift in criterion is already occurring removes a lot of training frustration for everyone – horse and handler alike. Once you get the hang of this approach, you’ll begin to understand what it means to train via reaction patterns. With that shift you’ll also discover that you are reaching your overall training goals faster.

Kay Laurence has a great video example illustrating the difference between training that is goal driven versus training for reaction patterns. The final outcome that she is working towards is having her dog put his foot up on a small box. In the goal-driven example, Kay waits to click until her dog lifts his paw onto the box. Her dog doesn’t understand that the box is important or that she wants him to put his paw on it, so even though he has received a click for approximating that behavior, he’s not sure what he should do next.

In the video Kay trains in sixty second units. During his first session, he presents many behaviors. He looks around, he noses the box, he lifts his other foot, he paws at the box, he walks sideways, he backs up, etc.. At the end of the sixty seconds the number of behaviors he’s offered versus the number that were clicked puts him down around a 20% success rate. But you don’t need to do the math to know that he’s a confused dog who isn’t having much fun. You just have to watch the clip to see that he’s teetering on the brink of shutting down altogether and going off to have a nap.

In the second video the box is still there, but now Kay is looking for something very different. In order for the dog to put his front foot up on the box, he first has to lift his leg up. So she is clicking for any shift of balance through his shoulder that brings his foot up off the ground.

This transforms the training. Suddenly the dog is getting click after click. It’s as though you’ve walked into a convenience store to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket only to discover that every card is printed with the winning numbers! I would eagerly buy that kind of lottery ticket. I like knowing I’m going to win, and so do our animals.

In this second video clip instead of looking lost, the dog is fully engaged. Very quickly he’s consistently lifting his paw. So now it’s an easy step to move the box so it’s in the path of the paw lift. Click, treat – you have your outcome behavior.

The dog didn’t begin by putting his paw on the box. Kay wasn’t waiting, hoping he would do something, anything she could click. He was set up to succeed at a 98% or higher success rate.

An important element in creating this kind of training success is the use of base behaviors. I’ll define what that means and give some training examples in the next section.

Coming Next: Part 3: Going Micro: Base Behaviors

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June 9, 2015 by theclickercenter

An Invitation

The series on Resurgence has generated a lot of interest, and I know from my in-box, also a lot of questions. So I’ve invited Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz and Kay Laurence to join me for an on-line question and answer session. I hope you will join us, as well.

When: June 21, 2015

What Time? 1 pm Eastern Time Zone (Check on line for time zone converters if you aren’t sure of the time difference.)

Cost: $35.00

Space is limited. If you would like to attend, do sign up early. The meeting is limited to a maximum of 25 people.

How do you sign up? Email me at: kurlanda@crisny.org. I will send you a paypal invoice for the meeting.

What do you need to participate? For optimum audio quality, a headset is recommended.

What should I bring? Lots of questions!

Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com

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:

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