Matching Law in Clicker Training

One of the things I don't see talked about a lot in equine R+ training is Matching Law.
I thought I'd share a video of mine and an article to get us thinking about it. Learning and behaviour is happening all the time and behaviour being reinforced and being repeated is happening and that influences our horses' future behaviour.
Sometimes we forget that learning is happening all the time, not just within the confines of a training session.
For example, if we were training our horse to nicely stand still and face forward around food (rather than pushing/mugging), but then at feed time our horse milled around us, stuck his head in the way and pushed his nose in the bucket and then we popped the food on the ground because we just want to get the feeding done. We are positively reinforcing behaviour with that feed. If we are feeding every day, but training once a week, which behaviour do we think is being more highly reinforced and therefore will be selected more in the future? Not the one we were hoping for and that's where we need to think about Matching Law!
Another equine example I like, is training to prevent grass diving. I read a lot of people like to let the horse eat and eat and eat, which means a huge positive reinforcement history is being built on eating grass. They then wait for the horse to come up for air, if you're lucky and you click and feed for that. They do that over and over and what do you think is happening if we think about how Matching Law works? The horse is building a strong positive reinforcement history on eating grass in your presence and a very thin weak history on having their head up and eating the food from your hand.
I train the behaviour of ignoring grass in the opposite way. I have a really high Rate of Reinforcement for the horse standing next to me and walking with me, over grass. Doing that behaviour is positively reinforced and builds a long strong positive reinforcement history and grass diving has zero reinforcement history! Easy! It's why my horses are so great at ignoring grass during R+ training sessions.
Sometimes we see behaviour and think, "that's odd!" But if we know that all behaviour has purpose and function for the horse, we then know something else is happening that is influencing our horse's behaviour. It could be Matching Law!
I started filming Mercedes. The plan was an A to B exercise where she walked towards me over some cavaletties. But she had other ideas and walked away from me, so I stopped filming. But then I started again when I saw what she was doing, what she was offering me!
The Reverse Round Pen was sitting in the middle of the arena, with a huge amount of positive reinforcement history from all the training we had done. She chose to walk around it, rather than walk directly towards me in a straight line, BECAUSE of how much history she had from walking around it.
She still came to me and sped up at the end for the extra bit of Discretionary Effort as well. She just chose the longer route, because of prior reinforcement history.
Pretty cool!
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