Clicker Training, walking Seymour March 23

Just as buckets become Conditional Stimuli, so do lots of other things when they’re paired with food, which is what happens when we train with Positive Reinforcement. The sound of our clicker or marker sound becomes conditional, but we become conditioned too! Also our food pouches, the jangle your clicker makes on your wrist, the mat your horse stations on every time you train, or the cone or target stick they target each time does too. Anything can be conditioned!
What also happens is that there is an Operant component again. When we repeatedly train with Positive Reinforcement, we build a reinforcement history on behaviours, places, things, ourselves!
It’s like a wonderful double whammy of goodness!
But this also means if you withhold food or even stop food altogether, you weaken and eventually break the association between the stimulus and the response, the Classical part, because the pairing is not maintained. With the Operant component as well, the behaviour goes into Extinction when it is no longer reinforced.
In a practical sense in our R+ training, I tend to see a lot of things in pictures, colours and diagrams. I can see scales being weighed up by my animals, which is illustrated in their behaviour and their enthusiasm or not, to do behaviours. I can see glowing red dots in places that have a strong reinforcement history and have been conditioned to be associated with things of value to the animal - food!. They remember and so do I.
I’ve trained in places that had no obvious mat or cone and yet they remember and will go back to that spot.
Just like we teach a horse “manners” around food and feed in a certain place away from us, they remember and will keep their mouth at that spot in the future and not in our food pouch.
Just like my clicking more than once at a certain place in my arena or point in the reverse round pen, guaranteed my horse will slow or stop at that point, there’s another glowing red dot of reinforcement history and Classical Conditioning pairing happening there.
This can also work the other way around. Have some trot poles on the ground and your horse pointedly ignores them like they’re invisible or worse, walks around them and avoids them. Then you’re looking at “bad Pavlov” where there is an unhappy association made with the poles and they are operantly avoiding an aversive stimulus.
#clickertraining
#positivereinforcementtraining
#donkeytraining
So next time your horse does something strange, think about Operant and Classical, about the pairing of stimuli and the Positive (or Negative) Reinforcement history of a behaviour.
Finally, emotion is something that also becomes paired/associated with these things. There’s always a feeling when they see the bucket, hear the click or stand on the mat or nose target the cone. Same goes for when they see the whip, the bit or the round pen.
The reason I started thinking about this was because my partner David was doing some training with Seymour. They were doing some lovely leading and I just had to film it. But unfortunately David doesn’t know about red dots, reinforcement history and Pavlov and he walked up to the mat and stepped over the bucket and Seymour stopped dead in his tracks. The R+ history that I’ve built with Seymour around walking up and stationing on that mat, in front of that bucket, is ridiculous. I’ve done that on purpose, to make it Seymour’s happy place for things like hoof care, eye care, trimming, vet visits, x-rays etc. Lots of things that Seymour felt uncomfortable about, can be made that little bit better because of all the pairings with food and the R+ training history.
I filmed a brief moment of leading before Seymour parked himself beautifully. If you’re super observant, you’ll notice he’s not actually on the mat, but he’s on the ‘red dot’ because I moved the mat to let the grass grow.