April 2007 Newsletter
Copyright 2007 Alexandra Kurland
The following posts were written for the_click_that_teaches email discussion list.
Contents:
Three-Flip-Three: New DVD
More On Three-Flip-Three
Redirection of Energy and Chains
Behavior Chains
Behavior Chain Questions: Definitions, Cues as reinforcers, "Punishing Parents", and More
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Three-Flip-Three DVD
By Alexandra Kurland
Copyright 2007
I just finished another DVD. This one is titled: "Three-Flip-Three: Understanding Lateral Flexions". There have been so many questions on three-flip-three, I know this has been a long awaited DVD.
Here's an overview of the material covered on the DVD:
The DVD begins with a short review of the "Why would you leave me?" lesson. That lesson, described in detail in the "Why would you leave me?" DVD, uses cones set out on a circle to teach your horse to stay with you and walk on a loose lead. The handler learns to recognize when her horse is connected to her, and when he is leaning in on her, or drifting away from her. As the horse connects more and more to his handler and keeps himself on the circle, the beginnings of lateral flexions evolve.
The "Three-Flip-Three" DVD shows you how to turn this lesson into a counted pattern that gives you the ability to separate from the circle without losing the good balance you have created. Like a gymnast on a balance beam, your horse learns how to keep himself aligned even as the patterns you are asking for become more complex.
The "Three-Flip-Three" DVD eavesdrops in on a lesson where the handler is learning how to move from the "Why would you leave me?" circle exercise to the counted pattern of "Three-Flip-Three". Her questions -the places where she tripped over her own feet, or couldn't figure out how the pieces of the puzzle fit together - are very much the questions many people will encounter when they first explore this lesson. You'll see not the finished, polished product, but how that product evolves, shaping layer by shaping layer.
The DVD also includes some great "t'ai chi walk" analysis of three-flip-three as the handler sorts out the pattern in her own body so she can understand what she wants her horse to do.
The final section of the DVD looks at practical applications for lateral flexions. Lateral flexions are the key to good balance. They help develop great gaits, they maintain soundness, and they build emotional stability. They are also a great tool for such everyday tasks such as helping horses to get past scary objects, or to ride in close to another horse, or to maneuver around obstacles out on the trail.
This DVD begins an exploration of lateral flexions, what they are, how to teach them to your horse, how to adjust them when your horse falls out of balance or overflexes, and how to use them for safety and performance.
This is the fourth DVD in a series I am producing to accompany "The Click That Teaches: Riding with the Clicker". It is intended to be used in conjunction with those other DVDs and the book.
To order, or to learn more about this DVD or the others in the series, visit my web site:
http://theclickercenter.com/2004/store/vids00.php
Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com
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More on Three-Flip-Three
By Alexandra Kurland
Copyright 2007
Future DVDs: The Lesson Plan
I was asked in a recent post if the new Three-Flip-Three DVD contains any riding. The answer is this DVD focuses on ground work. It explains what three-flip-three is, shows you how it evolves out of the "why would you leave me?" lesson and then shows you how to manage it on the ground. There isn't time in two hours to include riding as well. I know for some of you who are itching to ride, you're thinking: "Not more ground work! When is she ever going to get to riding!?" Remember riding is just ground work where you get to sit down. If you understand this exercise thoroughly on the ground, transferring it to riding is easy. And if you understand it first as a ground exercise, the riding will make much more sense.
So here's my plan for the next few DVDs just so you know where all of this is heading.
The next one, which I will be starting in the next couple days, is on hip-shoulder-shoulder.
Three-Flip-Three and Hip-Shoulder-Shoulder are cornerstone exercises. Understand those and all sorts of other things fall into place, so I want to be sure that I cover them well. The DVD I just finished will not be the only DVD that I make on 3-Flip-3. There is much more that needs to be said about that exercise, but it's a good beginning. What the new DVD will do for many of you is simply confirm that you are on the right track. You'll watch it and say: "yes - that's what my horse is doing. I'm getting it right." That's important confirmation - especially when you are working by yourself.
After the HSS DVD (all these initials!), I'll move into the riding. The first DVD will be on the mounting block lesson and a simple single-rein-riding lesson - riding around cones. I described that lesson in a post a couple of months back.
The mounting block lesson is another one of those key pieces. I use the mounting block to confirm that the horse is ready to take responsibility for a rider on his back, and that he will soften and yield his hips if needed. I treat it as a safety check lesson. Before a rider puts her bones on a horse's back, I want to know that it's safe to do so.
After the mounting block DVD I'll do one on the mechanics of single-rein riding. This will be without horses. We'll have riders sitting on saddles on saddle racks, and I'll go through the "t'ai chi" mechanics of the pick up of the reins. I've got some great footage of riders exploring the mechanics which illustrate well the process. This lesson will focus just on the rider. With the horse out of the picture, it is easier to see what the rider is doing. We have a second person at the horse's end of the reins so the "rider" gets feedback as changes occur.
With the mechanics of the rein pick-up in place, I'll move to the safety lessons of yielding hips and head lowering. The mechanics for these requests are tied in very much to the "t'ai chi" exercises illustrated on the recent "T'ai Chi Rope Handling Exercises" DVD. Everything is everything else.
The rein handling DVD will lead into riding the "Why Would you leave me?" exercise, followed by three-flip-three, and hip-shoulder-shoulder.
From there I can move on to more complex exercises, but this will give everyone a solid foundation.
It's a lot of hours of DVDs to watch (and a lot of hours of DVDs to make!). I wish it could be done much faster. There are many of you who don't need all the detail these lessons go into, but all you have to do is skim through a couple of days posts on the various lists to know that there are others who will welcome all this detail and then some. This approach to riding is not standard issue. We aren't surrounded by others riding in this way, so we don't have pictures of what it looks like, or an understanding of the steps needed to train in this way. Once you understand the system, it's actually a very simple way to ride, but because most of us were taught very differently, it seems complex. If this were the norm, it would seem as simple as it truly is.
I work on the DVDs in between other commitments so they come out at irregular intervals. That means you may be ready to move on before the DVD that you need is ready. The riding book gives you the overall road map, and certainly the posts on this list are great for filling in gaps. If we start using youtube that may help cover lessons I haven't had a chance to get to yet.
Three-Flip-Three
One other quick comment relating to three-flip-three. If you've been working on the WWYLM lesson, you've got the beginnings of 3-flip-3. I do hope as you watch the DVD you'll be thinking: "I'm getting this. That's what my horse looks like." But there is a caveat here and that's that there is no finished end product for 3-flip-3. I often equate 3-flip-3 to a musician practicing scales, or a ballet dancer taking her daily class at the bar. 3-flip-3 serves a similar purpose in your riding foundation. This is where you check in with your horse to see how he is feeling on any given day. Is he stiff or limber? Is the drill team lined up and marching in sync or is he wiggling all over the place? How much lift and engagement do you have?
You are never saying: "okay this is as good as this can get. I'm done now with this lesson. What's next?" Once you understand how to generate 3-flip-3, it becomes a tool you use to explore, refine, adjust your horse's balance. (There's yet another DVD -they're as endless as this exercise.) 3-flip-3 creates performance- it is not in and of itself the finished performance.
Performance Cues and Balance Shifts
When I first heard Kay Lawrence talk about performance cues, I went "but, but, but . . . the things we work on, don't have finished end products that you can box up and package with a tidy cue." I now understand that Kay and I are much more on the same track with our training, but this is still something to think about. There is a tendency, especially when you first start clicker training, to train certain behaviors in a way that I would regard as trick training. Let me see if I can explain this.
It's normal in the beginning to regard backing up, stepping forward, moving the hips over, etc., as discrete, separate behaviors. In that case you ought to be able to put a cue on each one. You ought to be able to say: "back" and have the horse back, or "step up" and have the horse come forward. And absolutely you can teach this to your horse. My horses have come and back up cues which are attached to requests for discrete behaviors. But that is not the core of their work.
Backing and coming forward are connected movements. They are related weight shifts. I want my horse to become very good at shifting his balance, redirecting his energy in any direction I ask for. So the underlying skill I am teaching is the redirection of energy. That's what I want to bring under stimulus control. Not the results of the redirection of energy - but the redirection itself. So if my horse is backing up and has backed up as far as I want, will he shift gears and come forward on request? Can he rebalance quickly, easily?
That changes the initial approach to stimulus control. If you spend a session clicking and treating your horse for going sideways, it shouldn't come as any surprise that the next day when you work with him, he'll be offering sideways. You can treat this as a discrete behavior, like sitting for a dog, and go about putting the behavior on cue and then establishing stimulus control for that cue. Or you can look at it from the perspective of weight redistribution.
Redirection of Energy
The principles of training say that for every exercise we teach, there is an opposite behavior we must teach to keep things in balance. That brings you to redirection of energy. You don't think about shutting the lateral steps down. You think about redirecting your horse's energy so the drill-team balance shifts him out of the lateral work. You can do this by over-rotating the hind quarters into hip-shoulder-shoulder and redirecting him into backing. Or you can use the front end to redirect him. You can straighten out his head and neck so that you can once again redirect the energy into a rein back. From the rein back you can go forward, sideways, or into a halt.
I'm probably going to get myself tangled in this next analogy but think of quantum mechanics. You can use the theory where energy comes in packages or the one where it travels in waves. Packages would be lumps of behavior. In dogs it's: "sit", "down", "roll over". In horses it's "back up", "step up" "whoa".
I want those goal behaviors in my horse, but I create them not as separate packages of behavior, but as a continuum of weight shifts. The better your horse becomes at responding to the weight shifts you are asking for, the lighter and more like heaven he will feel. As I said earlier this is a process that has no finished end result, just many milestones where you step back in amazement and delight as you admire your beautiful horse.
This has turned into a very long answer to a very simple question that could have been answered with one word. Except that one word would have been misleading. Riding and ground work are intertwined. The more I explore ground work, the better my riding becomes and vice versa. That's because at the core of both is this weight redistribution. Step by step in the DVDs I am sharing with you my current understanding of this process.
Every night when I am in the arena and I look across at Magnat at age twenty-nine looking still so very beautiful, I know it is worth all the time and trouble it takes to learn this work.
Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com
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Redirection of Energy and Chains
By Alexandra Kurland
Copyright 2007
> Alexandra Kurland wrote:
"Backing and coming forward are connected movements. They are related weight shifts. ... That's what I want to bring under stimulus control. Not the results of the redirection of energy - but the redirection itself."
>
> Pam writes:
“ Ah, this has really set off a bell in my brain. I think this is describing a point of struggling in my understanding. That step of moving from clicking for discrete behaviors vs weight shifts that happen in that behavior.”
Stimulus Control
Bells going off is good. I love the expression you used: "a ballet of weight shifts." Clearly it's time to go out to the barn and ask your horse what he thinks of all this.
Here's another way of looking at the weight shifts. When I first learned about cues and bringing behavior under stimulus control, you taught each behavior as a separate entity. You taught "back" as a single, discrete behavior. You got the horse to back and then you started to put the behavior on cue. The problem with this approach is it raises the question of what to do with off -cue behavior.
If you reinforce your horse for backing, you are going to have your horse offering the behavior in the hope that it will get you to play the clicker game. Your horse doesn't at this stage understand about cues. He just knows that in the previous session backing was a good thing. But now you are working on stimulus control so you aren't going to reinforce off-cue behavior. Your horse hasn't read the manual. He doesn't know how this part of the game is played, so he's trying his hardest to get you to click. He's not just backing a step or two. In his frustration he's backing twenty feet. How can you not reinforce that brilliant effort? But if you do, you've just blown your stimulus control, not to mention the havoc you're wreaking with your reinforcement schedules.
Teaching Behavior in Pairs
A better way, one that reduces frustration for both the learner and the trainer, is to teach behaviors in pairs. You teach over and under, left and right. Not "over", and then in a separate session "under". Not "left" today and "right" tomorrow. Not all behaviors you work on will have natural pairs, but many of the movement exercises do. So you teach "back" and then balance that with "come forward".
To get to the "ballet of weight shifts" another way of saying this is I want fluency. I want to be able to ask for back and have my horse respond without any hesitation. Then I want to be able to ask for forward and again have my horse respond without any hesitation. That means he has to understand the cues for both behaviors, and he must maintain his balance so he can respond promptly to them.
So here's a little game I can play with my horse. Let's say I've just given him a treat. At this point I can ask for either back up or go forward. He doesn't know which, so he has to be prepared for either.
I ask for backing. He gives me a prompt response. Click and treat.
I ask for backing again. He gives me a prompt response. Click and treat.
I ask for come forward. He gives me a prompt response. Click and treat.
I ask for backing. He gives me a prompt response. Click and treat.
I ask for come forward. He gives me a prompt response. Click and treat.
I ask for backing. He gives me a prompt response. Click and treat.
I ask for backing. He gives me a prompt response. I ask for come forward. He gives me a prompt response. Click and treat.
I've just built a small chain. I took two behaviors and strung them together using my cues.
And by the way, how many of you inserted the words click and treat between the second and third sentence in the highlighted response? If you were reading quickly, your brain probably filled in those words. You were so used to them being there, you put them in automatically. Your horse will have a similar response. He's so used to saying "yes" to you, to responding promptly to each cue, that he'll be offering the behavior before it's fully registered that you didn't click him for backing. By the time he's noticed, you'll be clicking and treating the second behavior, so the overall effect is still one of success.
Repeat this whole sequence, occasionally mixing in small chains, until your horse is comfortable with the process and understands that he will often have to perform multiple behaviors all for one click and treat.
Behavior Chains
There are two types of chains. One type, the kind I've described here, has as its links behaviors which have cues attached to them. When you chain these behaviors together, the cues become reinforcers for the behavior that preceded them.
This is such an important part of clicker training because it allows us to build complex performance without having to be constantly clicking and treating. But it is initially not all that intuitively obvious. I think that's because for so many of us cues are not positive reinforcers. The cues we use have ambiguous meaning, so we struggle with the idea that they can be used as reinforcers.
The most common example of an ambiguous, poisoned cue is your own name. Think back to your childhood. When your parents called you by name, did that always mean good things were about to happen? Play back the sound of your parents calling you by name. Just thinking about it may give you a tense feeling in the pit of your stomach. That cue certainly carries with it mixed emotions. Sometimes they were calling you to come for a treat and sometimes for a scolding.
So now you are trying to wrap your mind around clicker training and you're being told that a cue can reinforce the behavior that precedes it. Intellectually that makes sense, but it doesn't feel right which makes this concept a struggle for many people to learn and use well.
But let's go back to the example of asking your horse to back up and come forward. Every time you asked him to back up and he met your criterion, he was reinforced with a click and a treat. You've built your expectations in a methodical, clear way, so he's had enormous success associated with your cue to back. When you give the cue, he knows good things follow.
The Emotional Effect Travels Backwards
In classical conditioning the emotional effect travels backwards. When you start to attach cues to behavior, you are creating classically conditioned pairings. Backing, a difficult behavior for a horse to perform, is beginning to be something he really enjoys doing because it has such a strong link to food. So when you give the cue to back, it is now linked with positive associations. "Back", the cue, produces the behavior which leads to goodies. The good feelings associated with eating wash back over the preceding events.
The same thing is happening with come forward. "Come forward", the cue, leads to the behavior which leads to goodies.
Your horse responds promptly to both behaviors. So when you ask him to back, and then immediately follow it with the cue to come forward, he responds almost automatically to the cue to come forward, and when he does, click and treat.
When he backed up, he created an opportunity to come forward, and coming forward led directly to the click and treat. So coming forward reinforced the backing. Back up and the "green light" will appear that leads to the goodies.
This type of chain is maintained by the cues for each behavior. You can build chains that always run in the same direction, that have a set order. Here is where backchaining is so important. You normally teach the last link in this type of chain first so the animal is moving in the direction of the best known, most highly reinforced behavior.
You can also have chains that can go in any direction, where you can mix up the order of the behaviors in the chain. I could ask my horse to back up and then come forward. Or I could ask my horse to come forward and then back up.
There are also chains where you give one cue to start the sequence and the completion of the first behavior in the chain signals the start of the next behavior. Fetching is a great example of this type of chain. You throw out your fetch toy and then give whatever signal you use for your horse to go get it. Your horse leaves you, goes to the object, picks it up, returns to you, and releases the object to your hand - click and treat. You had to teach each of these steps of the chain, but then you merged them to form one long sequence of connected behaviors. Again backchaining is a useful concept for this type of chain.
As you can see from the examples I've given, chains can be very simple. All you need are a couple of behaviors that have cues attached to them and you can form simple chains. If you start thinking about chains, you may find that you have already taught your horse several very useful chains using the clicker.
What is of particular interest for riding are the chains that are maintained by internal cues and can run in any direction. Can you think of examples with your horse where you have the behaviors occurring in a different order within the chains? Can you chain three or more behaviors together, and again be able to change the order around?
Once you have simple chains, you can begin to chain chains together. That's where things really get fun and you start wowing people with your horse's performance.
Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com
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Behavior Chains
By Alexandra Kurland
Copyright 2007
This post was prompted by a series of questions on the list about behavior chains. There was confusion over both the definition of a chain, and how chains were built. This post addresses several of the qustions raised in these other posts.
Building Behavior Step-By-Step: Start Simple
There have been a lot of questions about chains. My general advice: Don't over think behavior chains. You all have many behavior chains already in place. Some have become so subtle that they don't feel like chains at all, as Jord Ann described. Some are more obvious because they are in the early stages of development and the cues are very obvious.
Learning about chains is very much like a child learning how to read. You don't plunk a six year old down with a copy of Ulysses. You give him "See Spot Run". And even before he is reading, he is learning to recognize letters and the sounds they make. Then he learns to put several letters together to sound out a simple word. Eventually he can put several words together to read "See Spot run." Listening to a six year old read is an exercise in patience. It's a long time before listening to a youngster read aloud becomes a real pleasure for anyone other than his parent.
We understand the step by step building of skills for something like reading. Teaching our horses about chains follows a similar route from the very simple to the amazingly complex.
Examples of Chains
Lindsey, you asked for examples of chains. I gave some examples of simple chains in a previous post. Here are a couple that are much more complex:
In Jim Logan's wonderful llama videos "Click and Reward" he shows one of his llamas going through an obstacle course. The llama opens a gate, turns around and shuts it, then walks over a teeter totter, backs through a chute, walks under an archway with streamers hanging down, and rings a bell. Throughout the sequence the trainer is out of sight. I may not be remembering all the obstacles. It's been a while since I watched the video, but it's a lovely example of the type of behavior chain where a single cue is given to initiate the sequence, then the animal moves through the chain without further guidance from the trainer. Each obstacle in the sequence tells the llama what to do next. He's learned that completing the obstacle takes him a step closer to the primary reinforcer at the end of the chain.
Want another example? How about the dolphins that are trained to find underwater mines. The dolphins leave their trainers, swim down to depths of as much as sixty or seventy feet, find the mine, return to the surface and alert the trainer. They are then given a pack of explosives to carry down to the mine. They attach the pack at just the right height to the mine's antenna. Too high and the mine might not detonate from the explosives. Too low and the dolphin could be at risk. The dolphin attaches the pack, then returns to the surface, jumps up into the boat, which then heads off to a safe distance from the mine. That's very neat training, especially since the dolphins are working in the open ocean often near schools of wild dolphins, and there are live fish available to them, not the dead fish the trainers use for rewards.
These are both examples of chains where the next task in the chain signals the completion of the previous task. But what about dressage tests, obedience trials, agility courses? Here the animal needs additional information. The chain is not performed without input from the trainer. The dog needs to know which obstacle in the agility course to go to next. The dressage horse needs to know how many steps of piaffe are required before it moves on to passage. These are chains where cues from the trainer are needed. The cues tell the animal which of several options to do next, and used well they serve to reinforce the previous behavior so a high level of performance is maintained. Want an example?
Watch Attila Szkukalek and his dog Fly perform "The Gladiator". (Do a search on Youtube to find the link.) See if you can spot all the cues he's using in this beautifully choreographed performance.
In comparison to Attila, most of us are probably still at the "See Spot run." stage, but that's all right. The child begins by sounding out individual letters then pieces them together into words and simple sentences. At some point he has the skill not only to read Ulysses, but to write his own great books. In the same way we begin by teaching our horses individual behaviors. Then we string them together to create simple "See Spot run" chains. We can aspire to the level of performances like that of Attila and Fly. I would love to see something comparable with our horses. Perhaps working together through this list, we can get there.
Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com
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Behavior Chain Questions: Definitions, Cues as reinforcers, "Punishing Parents", and More
By Alexandra Kurland
Copyright 2007
This post was prompted by a series of posts in which people got tangled up in the definition of behavior chains.
We've been having an interesting discussion lately. Thank you Katie for posting your "Should you click offered behavior?" article. Lots of good food for thought there. And Tanya, great post today on the rope handling. It's such a good reminder to look at all rope handling techniques - including the "t'ai chi" rope handling - from the horse's point of view. Depending upon how you ask, the horse will either glide back with ease or experience deep frustration and physical discomfort. That's why the underlying belief system is so important. Intent changes so much of the experience. And we want to find techniques that match our intent and the relationships we want to have with our horses. Great post!
We've had other great posts these last couple of weeks, but somehow the discussion on behavior chains got derailed, or at least diverted into a discussion of terminology. I think we need to start over. It seems as though there was some confusion over what constitutes a behavior chain.
I'm going to take my cue from Karen Pryor. At the Clicker Expos whenever there is a question on terminology during the panel discussions, she always turns the microphone over to Jesus Rosales-Ruiz. He's our resident Behavior Analyst on the Expo faculty, so it makes sense to go to him for clarification of the science. So that's what I did in the midst of this discussion.
I sent him a summary of the discussion as it was evolving. We seemed to have two definitions of behavior chains. The article by Karen Pryor, "Behavior Chains and Backchaining" (http://www.clickertraining.com/node/111) was cited in several posts. In that article Karen defined behavior chains as: an event in which units of behavior occur in sequences and are linked together by learned cues. . . Of course the biggest and most important chains in dog training are the performance chains: long sequences of many behaviors, linked, reinforced, and thus maintained by cues, in which the individual units may come in virtually random sequences. Running an agility course is an example."
But some on the list took exception to this definition of a behavior chain. They referred to it instead as a sequence, and they defined a behavior chain as: A string of multiple behaviors elicited by a single cue.
Fetch was cited as an example of a behavior chain.
So I asked Jesus what the definition of a behavior chain was. Were both examples chains? Or was it more correct to refer to the first type as a sequence, and only the second was a behavior chain?
Here is Jesus' answer:
"Both are behavior chains. I was not aware of the distinction between chains and sequences. The field of behavior analysis does not make that distinction. The only argument that I know about chaining is the identification of the cue for the next behavior. In some behavior sequences this is not so clear. In this case people tend to think that the organism's own behavior is the cue. So the argument is about what is the cue for the next behavior but all the sequences are considered chains."
I think we saw this confusion over the identification of cues in the discussion over what is a chain. Where people were getting tripped up was exactly what Jesus was indicating. It can sometimes be very difficult to identify the cues within a chain, especially when they are environmental cues, or cues from the handler which have become faded down or merged with other cues.
Simple Chains
I know we could have a very interesting discussion based on Jesus' response. But that's not the direction I want to head off in. I want to return to the original purpose of this exercise which was to incorporate youtube video clips into our discussions. I'd like to see what people are doing with the many exercises we've discussed on this list. And I want to see if people understand a very important part of clicker training and that's how to use cues to link one behavior with another. Here's a simple example:
Most of you - in fact probably all of you - can get your horse to back up. If you taught this with a clicker, you got a small shift of weight back, click and treat, and then gradually built on that until you could ask your horse to back up several steps, click and treat. Cues emerged out of the shaping process, or you attached a cue for backing once the behavior was occurring consistently.
Most, if not all of you, can also get your horse to walk forward following a target. Again you started by having your horse just orient to the target, click and treat, and then you gradually began to move the target so your horse had to walk forward several steps, click and treat. So you had a sequence of behavior that looked like this:
You presented your horse with a cue to back up.
He backed up multiple steps. Click and treat.
You then presented your target, and you may have added other cues as well to indicate to your horse that he was to follow the target forward.
He stepped forward multiple steps. Click and Treat.
You have two solid behaviors, but the "dance" looks a little choppy because you are stopping to treat your horse after each unit. So the question is can you combine the two behaviors into a longer, uninterrupted flow?
Can you ask your horse to back up and, as he satisfies your criteria for backing, present the target and ask him to walk forward?
Does your horse stall out, look confused, frustrated, or cross because he did not receive his expected click and treat? Or does he follow the target forward? Why does he follow the target forward?
If targeting is a strong behavior with a solid history of reinforcement behind it, before your horse has even registered that there wasn't a click after he backed, he'll already be stepping forward to his target. The presence of the cue triggers the behavior before he has time to think - "Wait a minute! What's going on here? You didn't click me for backing!"
And before he can get to this thought, you're clicking and reinforcing him for following the target. We want cues to serve as internal "yes answers" for the preceding behavior. "You backed up. That was correct, so now here's your next cue. Here's your target." The horse sees the target and instead of feeling grumpy, he moves eagerly forward. Why? Because targeting has a strong history of reinforcement behind it.
Building Chains
As I build my horse's understanding of chains, I need to think about how I am going to use them. If I only want the behaviors to run in one direction, I will always ask for them in a set order. "A" always leads to "B" which always leads to "C". Fetching is a chain which most of us run in only direction.
But I might also want "A" to lead to "B" to then back to "A" again. Or I might want to start with "B" and go to "A" and from there to "C".
Backing and following a target would fall into this type of category. I started this example out by having the horse back up and come forward. But I also might want him to come forward and then back up. I do not want to set the order in stone, so in the early stages of building my horse's global understanding of how chains work, I need to show him lots of different combinations. Sometimes I'll ask him to come forward, and then back up. Sometimes I'll ask him to back up and then come forward. I'll be aware of my patterns. I need to make sure that my mini chain doesn't become back up three steps each and every time, then come forward. It's easy to fall into patterns, especially when you have just a little material to work with. You can easily create a glass ceiling where your horse gets stuck if you ask for one more step than the pattern he's practiced.
What Keeps a Chain Going?
Let's look for a moment at motivators. Why does the horse keep working? Chains do not have to be positively built to work. You can have an animal, or a person for that matter, performing long sequences of behavior in order to avoid unpleasant consequences. "I do this and then this, and then this, so this other awful thing does not happen."
A jump course is a perfect example of this. Many horses truly love to jump and have been schooled kindly and fairly over jumps. But there are also horses that have learned to jump because they have learned they have no option but to jump. If you stop, or swerve to the side, you will be severely punished. Jump, and you may get snatched in the mouth, but the human will not beat you with a stick.
At the end of this kind of chain is safety. That is a huge motivator that draws the horse forward towards the end of a jump course. After the final jump, he gets to rest. He gets to stand with the other horses. His human leaves him alone. And he may even get to go back to the barn. The danger from falling is removed as is the fear of being chased forward from whip and spur. The closer the horse gets to the end of the jump course, the stronger and more eagerly he goes forward. "My horse loves to jump!" Hmm, maybe. Or maybe he is just eager to get to the safety zone at the end of the chain.
“Punishing Parents”
I do not want chains that are built by a "punishing parent". Clean your room or else. You may indeed grow up making your bed every day and putting all your clothes neatly away in your dresser drawer, but there will be an underlying stress to these behaviors, that sense that you are always having to watch your step. If you accidentally drop a sock and forget to pick it up, the "punishing parent" will descend. No matter how many times you have put away all your socks, there is always that looming possibility that you will be caught out.
The "punishing parent" can praise you for being tidy, but twined inseparately around that praise is the displeasure if you make a mistake. Poisoned cues. You can be so habituated to the stress that you are not consciously aware of it. Like the background noise of a city street, after a while you tune it out, but your adrenal glands don't. You may not be consciously aware of the stress until it surfaces as disease, but the stress has been there all along.
Perhaps before things go too far down that ominous road, you go away on vacation, and - separated from all the classically conditioned responses that are built into your normal environment - you become aware of the contrast in how you feel. Awareness creates the possibility for change.
Positively-Focused Environments
I think that is one of the great values of the clicker training clinics. We spend several days together completely immersed in a positively focused environment. People can safely experiment, make mistakes, discover successes. They aren't finding fault or growling at their horses. What they are doing is reinforcing behavior they want, and being non-reactive to unwanted behavior. People work hard at these clinics. We often have very long days, but people leave feeling refreshed, invigorated, as though they have been at a retreat, which in a very real sense they have.
And then, they are back home, back in familiar environments, and the contrast is often striking. Walk back into your work place, your barn, your family, your neighborhood, your larger community that is governed by a "punishing parent", and you now won't be able to tune it out. You'll know the difference, and you'll feel the stress that the underlying threat of punishment creates.
So the questions is do we have to have an underlying threat to maintain behavior? "I go to work to earn a paycheck so the bank doesn't foreclose on my house and take it away from me." Is that what keeps us showing up for work?
For our horses what else can motivate them and keep them working through to the end of a chain? From a clicker training perspective the answer is cues that have been built with a positive reinforcement history. The cues both trigger the next behavior and act as a conditioned reinforcer for the preceding behavior.
Each link in the chain has a strong reinforcement history behind it. Each link in the chain has a cue that triggers it. A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. If you have a behavior that is fairly new, that is not yet firmly attached to a cue, you want to use it very strategically in a chain. I would, for example, not ask for it immediately following another fairly new behavior. Nor would I use it towards the end of a long chain. If the horse fails to respond to the cue, and the horse stalls out in confusion or frustration, not only that behavior, but all the behaviors that preceded are affected. You have a domino effect where the negative emotion ripples back through the chain, weakening all the connections between the behaviors.
Ripples Back
In classical conditioning the emotional effect travels backwards. That's something else you want to think about as you are considering whether a chain has been positively or punitively built. Notice I am not saying whether a chain has been positively or negatively reinforced. I want to step aside for the moment from the scientific terminology and look instead at the emotional associations the horse has with the individual elements of the chain and the chain as a whole.
If I slide down the lead, and my horse backs up, I can release the lead. That's negative reinforcement. I applied pressure to my horse's halter, a slightly uncomfortable sensation for the horse. I also shifted his balance slightly so there is pressure on his joints. When he took a step back to rebalance, the pressure on his face and his joints was released. In addition, I clicked and treated. As I repeat this, my horse may come to view my hand sliding down the lead as a good thing. It is information he uses to get to his treat faster. If I have been careful in how I use this pressure so it never crosses a threshold level where the horse feels afraid or is in pain, the associations I build can be very pleasant ones.
But suppose my horse doesn't back up promptly. What do I do? Do I wait patiently at a point of contact? Do I offer him other clues, perhaps touching him as well on his shoulder, or shifting my balance more obviously? Do I simplify the request, or change the environment so it is easier for him to learn? The important question is do I keep all these clues and influencing factors under his pain/fear threshold? Or do I escalate to get a faster response? Do I cross the pain/fear threshold? That will alter the associations my horse makes with my initial request.
Touch the lead, back up, get a treat - good deal. The next time the handler touches the lead, the horse will be looking forward to pleasant consequences. The emotional effect washes backwards.
Touch the lead, get whacked hard across the front legs, back up, pressure goes away. This is a very different scenario. The next time the handler touches the lead, the horse may indeed back up promptly, but there will be a little zap of stress associated with the request. "If I don't guess right - will I be hit?"
In the first instance I connect the the back up behavior to another behavior and let the positive emotions ripple backwards. I can ask my horse to come forward, and then slide down the lead to ask the horse to back up. The slide down of the lead has positive associations. In the past it lead to a click and a treat. So the cue to back up can serve to reinforce the preceding behavior, which in this case is walking forward.
Chains Are Not Simple
So that's the basic premise behind behavior chains. However, chains are anything but simple. The motivators, what keeps an animal working through to the end of a chain, can be a complex mixture of negative reinforcers, positively built cues, poisoned cues, and punishers. If internal cues are not maintained well, the individual behaviors in the chain may drop out, merge with other behaviors, become foreshortened. This can be a desired result, or an unintended consequence. Chains can break down entirely. They can collapse like a house of cards, so how do we build strong, unbreakable chains? How do we teach our horses not just individual chains, but a global concept of how chains work? How do we eliminate unwanted behavior from a chain? Where is the beginning and end of a chain? When we pick a particular cue as the starting point and the click and the treat as the end point, are we being arbitrary in that. Is that really the beginning and the end from the horse's point of view? Is there really such a thing? Can we get very off the track and say that all of life is one huge chain. Aargh!!
When something is complex, it often works best to begin by looking at simple models of the thing we want to study. Sometimes we find that the simple model clarifies things and can explain a whole class of much more complex responses. Sometimes, as in the case of much of modern physics, we discover that our original model is too simple and doesn't really work to explain what we are discovering. We may have to redefine our model, or even set it aside entirely as we gather more data.
Chains very quickly become complex, so rather than trying to wrap our minds around complex examples, let's begin by looking at very simple chains. I'd like to go back to the beginning of this discussion on behavior chains and propose that for the moment we table discussions of definitions and instead gather some data. In other words, let's go to people for opinions and horses for answer by testing the following hypothesis:
If we define a behavior chain as: "an event in which units of behavior occur in sequences and are linked together by learned cues. . .", do cues indeed serve to reinforce the preceding behavior? Can you build sequences of behavior using a positively built cue and the behavior it triggers to reinforce the preceding behavior? Will your horse continue working with the same level of enthusiasm he showed for the first behavior? Or does he stall out, freeze up, lose interest, become confused or frustrated when a cue is presented for another behavior rather than a click and a treat?
Let's find out.
Barnwork
I'd like to see some examples of simple chains, two or three behaviors linked together by cues. I am treating this use of cues as a hypothesis. We are told that a cue can act as a conditioned reinforcer. What does that mean in practical terms and is this indeed the case? Is this how chains work? As we proceed with this exploration we may find ourselves questioning some very basic assumptions and redefining some of the terms we've been using. That's fine. In fact that would be a grand use of this list, but before we go there with the discussions, I'd like to see us collect some data.
So its off to the barn with everyone. Can you build a simple chain along the lines of the back up - go forward in the example given in this post? Feel free to use different behaviors, but keep your chain simple at first.
I need to add a P.S. After giving this particular ball a bit of a push forward, I should say that I am entering a pretty intense travel schedule, so my contributions to the list will be sporadic at best. I am sure the discussion that follows will be an interesting one to read on my airplane trips.
Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com