Fenzi Dog Sports Academy - OB625: Unchain Your Performance

Course Details

I lied. We are totally going to chain it. But through chaining... FREEDOM!

Freedom from hot dogs in your pockets. Freedom from balls in your armpit. Freedom from feeling "chained" to reinforcing every behavior with a primary reinforcer.

Build trust, confidence, and motivation through the power of behavior chains. Sequence your performance behaviors to teach the dog that reinforcement outside the ring is totally worth the performance inside the ring.

Goal: To be able to set up a reinforcement station (like food at your chair/crate), move the dog into a different space (like a ring), perform a continuous chain of behaviors (like a performance), and then exit to the reinforcement.

Registration

There are no scheduled sessions for this class at this time. We update our schedule frequently, so please subscribe to our mailing list for notifications.

Registration will begin at 12:00 Noon Pacific Time.

Enrollment limits: Gold: 12 students, Silver: 25 students, Bronze: unlimited.

Gold Level includes access to all course materials and the ability to post questions and videos to the course forums. Students will receive instructor feedback on written and video assignments.

Silver Level includes access to all course materials and the ability to participate in the discussion forum. Students may ask GENERAL questions about course materials and may submit two, one-minute videos for instructor feedback. Any questions specific to your dog MUST be accompanied by a video.

Bronze Level includes access to all course materials and the ability to read all questions and answers posted in the class forums. Students will not post questions or submit written or video assignments.

For more details, refund policies, and answers to commonly asked questions see our FAQ page.

Syllabus

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*I'm still working on the curriculum for this course over the next couple of weeks. These are some of the specific topics that we will be covering, but the order is subject to change. STAY TUNED!

Cues as reinforcers
Zen bowl review
Mini-chains
Reinforcement rituals
Voluntarily entering food-free space to access reinforcer
Leash on/off routine
Exit the ring to reinforcement
Transitioning between exercises
Sequencing exercises to final reinforcement ritual

Prerequisites & Supplies

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Gold and silver participants *must* have taken Obedience Skillbuilding 1 & 2 at some level.
No prerequisites for Bronze participants.

These skills should be fluent and under stimulus control (meaning the dog can perform them on cue and without luring or prompting):

zen bowl
nose touch
stationary heel position (either sit or stand)
sit
down

Knowledge of event markers and basic shaping concepts is assumed.

Equipment:

Zen bowl
Ring gates or some kind of barrier to delineate space (does not need to be formal ring gates)
Mat and/or crate

Sample Lecture

The first thing we need to understand is that cues are reinforcers.

Cues are reinforcing because they are opportunities, and opportunities are very reinforcing. Even if you don’t get anything yet! Just the opportunity to possibly get something can be HUGELY reinforcing (depending on what exactly that opportunity represents).

What that means for us is that *IF* a cue is a reliable predictor of an opportunity for reinforcement, the cue becomes a conditioned reinforcer.

Cue -> Behavior -> Event Marker -> +R

The cue becomes a tertiary reinforcer because it is 2 degrees removed from a primary (or unconditioned) reinforcer.

Food = Primary Reinforcer

Click = Predicts food = Secondary Reinforcer

Cue = Predicts opportunity for click = Predicts food = Tertiary Reinforcer

So because the cue is a conditioned reinforcer, it has the same power as an event marker as a click.

IN FACT (and this is really totally mind blowing, or it was for me), the *click* IS a cue. It predicts a very reliable behavior… eat food! (We can get more complicated than that, but it’s not terribly relevant for this class, so I’ll refrain.)

So every single behavior you train is actually a mini-behavior chain. Cool, right? I KNOW!

Ok, so I think it’s important to know that, while these secondary and tertiary conditioned reinforcers do require conditioning, these are natural processes that are occurring to and around us all the time.

In fact, the process of conditioned reinforcement through associative learning (which is what is underlying the chaining concept), is how animals learn to do complex tasks in the wild for evolutionary benefit. For example tool use, foraging strategies, and any behavior that must be coordinated for a period of time before the payoff (wolves hunting?). This is observable and repeated over and over again in many, many species… birds, alpacas, primates…

Crow learning a behavior chain to access food:

How conditioned reinforcers work

So at some point you have heard that because we pair a click with food, the click becomes a secondary (conditioned) reinforcer, and so eventually the click itself becomes reinforcing. This is true! However, we are talking about reinforcement in the scientific sense. Some folks may have slightly misunderstood this idea of a conditioned reinforcer, and then extended this to include clicking without treating as the way to go, because the click is now a conditioned reinforcer and has reinforcing power on it’s own.

The click is only reinforcing because it reliably predicts an opportunity for the primary reinforcement. If we turn the click into a poor predictor of primary reinforcer, by not feeding when we click, then it will quickly lose that conditioned power like a new car loses value after you drive it off the lot.

As long as the relationship between the click and the food is maintained, the sound of the click WILL act to reinforce whatever behavior is occurring at the time the click is perceived. When that relationship is broken, the click no longer reliably predicts food… it loses is reinforcement property, and can quickly become noise.

Our cues work the same way.

Different primary reinforcers (like kibble vs hotdog), have different relative values. The same also goes for behaviors and their relevant cues. The value of a particular behavior/cue will vary depending on the situation.

Take this situation for example:

Your initial state: holding a warm Krispy Kreme doughnut + hungry

You have a limited behavioral repertoire (for the sake of this game, bear with me):

Put doughnut in mouth
Throw doughnut on ground
Jumping jacks
Running

Your brain will consider each of these options as behavioral choices in this situation, and assign values to each option. If you are a normal human, you will likely VERY quickly assign a HIGH value to choice #1, and dismiss the other choices as not advantageous.

In this case, the situation of doughnut in hand is a cue, the behavior that cue predicts is doughnut in mouth, and doughnut in mouth is a reliable predictor of JOY!

Your state has now changed and your brain assesses the new state to be an improvement over the initial state. This is good!

So this is how a single behavior is learned… and we do it all the time.

However, how did you learn to drive to Krispy Kreme, go inside, purchase a box of hot delicious doughnuts, open the box, and pick up a doughnut… so that you could find yourself in the position to make the choice to either eat it or throw it on the ground?

That is a behavior chain.

Each choice that you make in the sequence that takes you from hungry in your house to eating a warm doughnut at Krispy Kreme acquires a conditioned reinforcement value… and the value of the primary reinforcer at the end of the sequence transfers forward in the chain.

This works because each behavior that you complete within the sequence changes your state to one you associate with being closer to doughnut consumption.

State 1: Hungry at home

State 2: Driving to Krispy Kreme

State 3: Ordering at the register

State 4: Holding box of hot doughnuts

State 5: Open box of hot doughnuts

State 6: Doughnut in hand

State 7: JOY!

You know from previous learning history that each successive state is predictive. So in fact, when you make a choice, the new state functions as a cue… an opportunity to make another choice. That choice results in a change of state, and that new state is good (because closer to doughnut), and so that new state functions to reinforce the choice you just made AND as a cue to then make another choice.

You can also see that if there was a gap in the chain. If you chose to drive to Krispy Kreme, and it was closed (I know it’s upsetting to think about)… you would not find the new state that resulted from your driving to be functionally reinforcing. If you then ran a few errands and came back, and it was open, you might still get your doughnut, but you have a broken chain because the behavior of driving directly from your house to Krispy Kreme was not reinforced.

If you sat in the parking lot for a few minutes and then it opened, your chain may still function. You may simply learn to put a little duration on your parking lot behavior, because it was, in fact, reinforced. But as soon as you leave Krispy Kreme property without your doughnut, your chain has broken.

Each state only works to maintain the chain because each new state tells you that you are closer to your goal.

In behavior chain terms, these successive states are called “internal” cues, because there is no one outside your “box” giving you cues (not entirely in this case, because you likely responded to external cues in the form of traffic signals on the way).

If someone told you to drive, then park, then open the door, then order the doughnut, then open the box, then put the doughnut in your mouth… those would be “external” cues. Yes, that would be odd and controlling (and can you imagine of one of those cues were to be late? OMG!), but that’s how it would function in theory. And it might make sense if you had no learning experience to draw on that told you which actions to take to get closer to your goal.

But in either case, the cue to do the next thing reinforces the previous action. If at any point, you are left hanging… waiting for information (what do I do now?), the reinforcing value of that cue is lost. The cue (whether external from a handler or internal from a changed state) MUST occur just as you complete the previous behavior.

In performance chains, we have a combination of internal cues and external cues maintaining the chain. Many will come from you as the handler. Some will come from the dog’s state changing in the environment. “Oh! I have a dumbbell in my mouth! That’s a new state! I choose to bring it to my handler!"

And that is also why a “poisoned” cue will not function well within a chain. If the cue does not reliably predict a desired outcome, then the reinforcing value of the cue is lost.

In Karen Pryor's words, "Even though successful response to a given discriminative stimulus is still followed by reward, if failure is now followed by punishment, you have made that discriminative stimulus ambiguous in terms of predictable outcome. It is no longer 'safe.' You have poisoned your cue."

To read the full text of her article, click here.

Testimonials & Reviews

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A sampling of what prior students have said about this course ...

I LOVE all of Hannah's classes! She teaches things I didn't even know that I didn't know and NEEDED to learn! Thank you!

I think many of us thought about getting into the ring and making our dogs comfortable. But no one else has addressed getting out of the ring! How to make your exit reinforce your work so your dog wants to go back and work again. Only Hannah's class has ever addressed this that I know of. One of the top classes I have ever taken.

Thank you, Hannah! This has been one of the most helpful classes I've taken at the academy. I really didn't understand how chains worked at all, before this class, so that was a tool I just didn't have in my toolbox. I didn't know how to create chains, how to maintain them, or what to do when they broke down. I feel like I now have such a better understanding of how to build training sessions and how to work on trial prep with something other than just simple skill building and ring confidence. I know have an understanding of the whole picture, and what I can do to get there!

No one, but no one breaks tasks down like Hannah does. I would take any class she teaches (and often have). She also addresses the emotional aspects of tasks which I hear from few others outside the FDSA group.

I love how Hannah bases her training on science. I also love how she teaches us to break out behaviors to train them, and to fix a behavior that breaks.

I read all the lectures and looked at the videos and learned so much with the small amount of time I was able to devote to the classes! I have incorporated what I have learned into our training sessions and have seen a difference in my dog's focus and enjoyment. I will most certainly be taking classes in the future. Thank you! Hadley A.