I’m still searching for a point of intersection with the mainstream interpretations of behavior and learning and I’m starting to get the impression the learning theorists are ducking a simple question. I’ve posted it here and on several sites, and perhaps it’s so simple it’s thought of as trivial, especially with all the heady talk of learning theory, but if so, this is a critical error.
Currently on the web site “Dog Star Daily,” which is promulgating the work of Dr. Ian Dunbar, Lee Kelley is engaged in a point-by-point discussion involving neuro-anatomy and learning theory as he argues for a different interpretation of what such evidence reveals.
Click here for the discussion.
Lee is being taken to task for an article he wrote on his Psychology Today Blog wherein he entertains the proposition that Operant Conditioning might be losing the intellectual battle against the Cesar Milan media juggernaut because why would there be a media juggernaut if Operant Conditioning model was truly comprehensive. The OC camp counters by saying what battle? And if there is one it’s due to a misapplication and misunderstanding of learning theory. They also argue that whatever technical success Cesar enjoys is due to his inadvertently capitalizing on those aspects of learning theory that he is able to apply correctly.
As I mentioned, on this particular web site there is in depth discussion of neural anatomy as well as liberal use of the term “thinking.” The following quote was posted by “fun4fido” in the above mentioned article and thread that was prompted by Lee’s article.
“…there are two different processes, a dogs behaviour is guided by either emotion or thinking. Two sets of structures in the brain share a very important relationship in canine behaviour. The limbic system is a complex circuit of neural structures involved in the expression and experience of emotions. The cerebral cortex on the other hand is involved in various cognitive functions including learning, thinking and problem solving.
The limbic system and the cerebral cortex have an inverse relationship. When either one is activated, the other system cancels out, or rather gets over-ridden. If a dog is mentally stimulated and encouraged to think, his cerebral cortex will be activated and learning is effective. In this state he is less likely to experience intense emotional responses. Likewise, a dog that experiences intense emotional responses has his limbic system activated and his cerebral cortex inhibited. A dog experiencing an intense emotional response – and I must stress the word intense, is reacting to a given stimulus/event and no longer thinking. This intense emotional frame of mind is not a good place for a dog to be because it can push him/her to react instinctively, and not all instinctive behaviours are helpful to a dog in the human world.
Learning is best accomplished when a dog is in thinking mode, in particular, this is why counter conditioning and desensitisation should always be applied while the dog is sub-threshold, when a dog is over threshold his/her stress level is too high, emotions take over, the dog starts to react, and is unable to learn effectively.”
Now this is a very definitive statement based on drawing an explicit connection between components of the brain, and I can understand the merit of such logic. The fact that dogs and humans share certain critical brain structures that seem central to thinking does present a compelling argument that dogs may be capable of thinking. OC believes this is then confirmed in the phenomenon of learning. Therefore, it seems reasonable to ask the question that such definitive statements beg, what are dogs thinking?
Pet communicators likewise claim that dogs think but then they go on the record and articulate what they think dogs are thinking. So since learning theorists argue that the phenomena of complex and learned behavior is fully encompassed by the science of learning, what are dogs thinking?
Roger Caras once said, a bit facetiously, that dogs think about 3 things: sex, food, and tennis balls.
But of course all 3 are based on desire (if hunger can said to be a form of desire), not on any sort of conscious thought process.
One of the arguments I made in reply to fun4fido (her name is Angela, she’s +R trainer from England), is that rational thought would not give animals an adaptive advantage nature. It’s too slow, uses up too much energy, and could get you killed.
Here’s a link to that comment:
http://bit.ly/VkT2
I didn’t mention anything about morphic fields (or what Kevin calls network consciousness), or Kevin’s energy theory. I plan to do that (bring up the energy theory, not the morphic fields) in the next installment, which has the working title, “Of Mice and Mutts II: The Role Desire Plays in Learning.”
I also plan to get into how the pushing exercise proves that there are underlying flaws in the philosophy of behavioral science.
I look forward to more cannonballs coming from the other side.
Meanwhile, I think this challenge to those who say dogs can think, may yield some interesting results, that is if they’re willing to tell us what they think dogs are thinking.
LCK
LCK
Hi Kevin, I wanted to talk about abuse.I believe that abusing a dog is one of the most cruel things you can do.Sunday afternoon, I walked next door to my neighbors house(she has fostered dogs for about 11 years, and she recently started her own rescue ”Manes and Danes” she’s actually the person who got us into dogs, we’ve known her for about 6 years)Anyway I walked over to see a puppy a couple had brought over to get a vaccine.As I went up I slowed down,sort of waiting for the puppy to come to me, I was so used to dogs being timid,I did’nt even think about it.That puppy zoomed toward me and started biting on my hand, it was a beautiful, blue pitbull,about 12 weeks old.I had forgotten how pure a little puppy could be, how it could completely be comfortable in its world.I walk out my back door and I see dogs that only trust me and April and even that trust is thin.And I wonder what they would be like if they had never been hit, never been kicked, never been screamed at, never been chased, never been broken.Would they still jump at a loud noise, cringe when someone picks up a stick, pee when someone reaches down, snap and feel so out of control?No.I don’t think so.I’ve seen dog after dog come through my neighbors rescue, when they first come they don’t even stand up all the way around humans, they wont even look at you.So the next time you get the urge to yell,or grab your dog, please, please, please remember that nothing is worth the trust of your dog it one of the greatest honors in you could ever have.
First, what the heck does the above post have to do with anything? *confused*. April, can you expand on what you were thinking/feeling? It comes across like you think NDT uses abusive measures to do what they do, which…they don’t. */rather confused*
Kevin, I’ve been reading through your blogs (and all the comments as well) over the past few days, and although I’m not completely sure (I am thinking about getting your book) I *think* you’ve hit the nail on the head in regards to dogs.
I have read through a ton of dog [training] books, websites, articles, etc, trying to figure out just how it was, that dogs should be trained. When Cesar’s stuff first came out, I was very interested, because it Worked. (I know he has been discussed just about every way he can be, so I’m not trying to start a discussion, merely show where I’m coming from.) I liked, and agreed with his idea that dogs live in the moment, and that a lot of times, it is our energy and how we are feeling, that they respond to. But I always thought he was missing something. And I didn’t like the whole…complete submission idea.
From watching his videos, his dogs aren’t necessarily afraid of him, but they don’t seem all that…spontaneous. And he says he doesn’t love one dog more than another, he loves them all the same (all 30-50 of them) – where is that special bond between owner/dog? And his techniques are for rehabilitating problem dogs, not raising/training puppies/dogs. Besides that, it’s based on an incorrect alpha model. So…with all that being said, I think his methods are wrong with the R+ methods seeming to be a much better method. But it still not quite right to me – it is still missing something.
In old old books, like the ones written by Jim Kjelgaard (stories, not training manuals), how is it that they could train their dogs 99% of the time with out force, and yet without all the treats (positive reinforcers), and yet still get awesome results, and have that special bond with their dog? And for that matter, why is it that sled dogs will run/pull even they are severely injured?
I think you’ve found the answers to those questions – to the question: what drives a dog? And with the knowledge of what that drive is, we’re able to tap into it, and control the dog (not necessarily control, but I don’t know how else to put it). And you can do it while not breaking the dog’s spirit, keeping them lively, spontaneous, flexible, social, and without behaviour problems. And that’s without punishments, and without using food to train (yes, I noticed the differentiation between the way you and others use food – I really dislike the use of treats for training), just by getting them to *want* to do what you want them to do.
And That, is pretty amazing.
A couple questions however: In talking about spay/neutering, I really liked what you had to say about it. However, you mainly talked about the effects on males. Are you going to devote a post to the spaying side of it? I’d be really interested in that. Does your book include not only your theories, but how to raise a puppy from start? What type of german shepherds did you used to import http://www.shawlein.com/The_Standard/13_Breed_Type/Breed_Types.html (one of the ones described in the link would be specific enough – if you went deeper I probably wouldn’t know what you were talking about:p)
Sadly, with all of this said, I don’t even have a dog (despite wanting one badly). I’ve only had one dog, when I was twelve and then only for a couple months, and I likely won’t be able to get a dog either for at least a year or two, as I’m at university. 🙁 Still, might as well learn everything I can beforehand.
Lynx
(and sorry for the really long post :p)
Well April, I’ve read some of your other replies, and I guess you figured out/know that NDT, from everything I understand, doesn’t use punitive measures to train. I do agree with your post though – anyone who abuses anyone, be it animals or people, is certainly losing their dog’s trust, and even Breaking the dog. It is one of the worst things a person can do – I really really really don’t like abusers.
-Lynx
Hey Lynx, sorry about the confusion in the above post. My sister Naomi is also using my profile and she wrote the comments about abuse. I’m not quite sure why she put them right there under that article, but she would never say that NDT methods are abusive or accuse anyone that practices NDT as an abuser. She just recently had an ah-ha moment about abuse and wanted to write something down I guess. Some of the other comments are mine and some are hers, really sorry about the confusion, She’ll definitely need to set up her own proile. Um, just in case you’re wondering about how to tell my comments from hers in order to clear any further confusion, Naomi does not space after commas or periods. Hope that helps.
Hi Lynx,this is Naomi and I’m so sorry my comment came off that way,I’m just going to say this if anyone else thought thats what I meant, NDT IS NOT ABUSIVE.
In fact,it is the first training I’ve ever come across that does not have ANYTHING about being the boss, packleader, alpha or anything else that tells you to try to control your dog by physical force.Also I had to cut that comment short, so it did’nt really end the way I wanted it to.As for what I was feeling, pretty angry, we live way down south in Georgia(right outside Savannah) and I’m not sure how it is where you live, but here abuse to dogs seems to be everywhere,rescue groups try so hard to educate people but there’s only so much they can do.Anyway I was just voicing my thoughts.So once again.Sorry for the confusion. (By the way my sister is obessed with English so pay her no attention.)
[…] lot from positive trainers is that their methods “make a dog think.” If dogs can think, what are they thinking? No one seems to be able to answer that question. (And if you ask me, even the simple idea that […]
Hehe. I can understand wanting to vent about that subject. It can be pretty distressing. When I did have my dog Boots (for a few months), my father paid no attention to her for the first month or two. It was my mom who did all the training, and she did it very gently, and Boots caught on almost instantly about everything. And then my father started to take an interest her, in walking her and training her, and he was much more…forceful, dominant, using punitive measures (actually, he was outright abusive – to all of us). I remember there was an almost instant change in her behaviour, and most definitely for the worse.
My parents split a few months later, and due to where we were moving, it was impossible for us to bring Boots. Which is quite sad, really. But that was 8 years ago.
Another question. I read somewhere that Kevin was going to do a blog on how sleeping on bed big NDT no-no. I was wondering if this has been posted, and if someone could direct me to where it is?
Yes Lynx, I understand completely what you mean, also there is a great article about why dogs sleeping in beds with other dogs or humans is a big no-no,well actually its a reply to a question but you can find it under the Milo-and-Indy-recreate-the-past article and thats in blogs.Hope that helps.
One thing about Cesar Millan: his videos are edited, and in particular wherever he tries something that doesn’t work, or doesn’t work for long, or doesn’t work very well, these troubles are fixed via editing of the program. I blogged about one of Millan’s more blatant silly lies shows, where creating a wrong impression more visibly the name of the game, here: http://jennyruthyasi.blogspot.com/2009/07/cesar-millans-mastery-of-ilusion.htm
So, all the stuff about why Millan’s stuff works can be answered by saying, it doesn’t. It works as a television show though!! But Millan has never put any sort of behavior title on a dog, he himself says he doesn’t train dogs, and as we see in his above clip, problems are resolved by first denying the dog has a problem and then, by getting rid of the dog!
Personally, I just don’t have time or interest to engage in the circular illogic and rhetoric of Lee Kelly, and can’t imagine why he or anyone would bother with it, it gives me a headache! but I do think Kevin Behan has some nice things to contribute to dog training, and I wish he would take some classes in behavior science so that when you are arguing against it you’ll know what you are arguing against, instead of being incorrect so often when you say “behavior science says….”
But if what we’re talking about here is what will be a good television show? Maybe you’re right. You can be like the Christian fundamentalists who don’t believe in evolution, only you’d be the dog guru who doesn’t believe in operant conditioning. But I can only laugh at that. I don’t see why you’d want to isolate yourself that way, but I do hope you make tons of money and have fun with it, like Millan certainly hasn’t had any big career problems, in spite of his poor training skills.
Sorry, my link above to the Millan clip screwed up, but if this link doesn’t work, just search “Cesar Millan Mastery of Illusion” in the search boax on the upper left side of my blogspot page. I got a hoot of this clip.
http://jennyruthyasi.blogspot.com/2009/07/cesar-millans-mastery-of-ilusion.html
I prefer the following historical precedent to characterize Natural Dog Training. We’re the folks saying the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth—i.e. dogs don’t learn by reinforcement—although it sure does look that way, whereas mainstream behaviorism I would say is the theological orthodoxy. What I don’t understand about the learning science as discussed on Dunbar’s website where they take Lee to task, and I presume they have taken the classes, is that they constantly refer to thinking, and then fail to say what the dog is thinking. Whereas I’m discussing precisely what’s going on in the mind of the dog based on an energy theory. Yet the movement in current science is increasingly basing its theory on the conjecture that dogs are capable of thinking, and then has nothing to say on the subject. I believe this simple question, what is a dog thinking? illustrates that modern learning theory is self-contradicting. It has no way to accredit that a dog has an intelligent mind without resorting to thoughts. I invite any expert to please insert a thought into the thought bubble that they are drawing over the dog’s head. Meanwhile NDT isn’t limited by this contradiction in terms. I would also like to thank Russell for contributing Perception Control Theory to our discussion because from what I’ve learned so far, it substantiates my energy model. (Although I would argue NDT embraces PCT rather than the other way around.)
I would add to what Kevin said by suggesting to Jenny Ruth that you’re the one who’s engaging in circular logic. For instance, in relation to why Freddie was stopped from scavenging by my praise you said that it was clear to you that it was the result of operant conditioning. When I asked you to explain why you thought so, you never did. On your blog, when I said that dogs don’t think about future events (i.e., engage in mental time travel) you said you could prove they do, but never posted any such proof.
In other words you’re saying the sun revolves around the earth without providing any proof that it does, just “I can’t bother with your illogical arguments,” and “you and Kevin don’t know as much about behavior science as I do.”
I’m also curious as to why you refer to it as “behavior” science, not behavioral science. Google the 1st and you get 133,000 hits. Google the second and you get almost 2 million. And anyway, hasn’t the terminology been changed to behavioral analysis?
Also, saying someone’s arguments are illogical isn’t the same thing as proving that they are. Where’s your proof that anything I’ve said is illogical? I haven’t seen any.
LCK
I focus on the behavior, on manifest behavior that I can see, not try to say what the dog is thinking so much, more, what is the dog DOing. Behavior science isn’t like Freudian psychology, where we think the dog is thinking about his childhood or his deep repressed sexuality or whatever! haha. But more, a dog tries a behavior, experiences a consequence and then the dog thinks, (not in words, but in an emotional way of knowing) “aha! When I bark, that works out well. so, bark, bark, bark!” or whatever. Whatever the dog means when he thinks “that works out well” (dog goes away, or handler comes running to bring him inside, or barking just feels good, whatever) that is reinforcement. He gets what he wants. How do I know that the barking behavior is being reinforced, and that the dog is getting what he wants? He barks. If he chooses NOT to bark, that means that barking isn’t being reinforced & possibly, it’s being subjected to punishment). So in that way, I know what the dog is or isn’t thinking.
Lee, your dog predicts the future and remembers the past every time he responds to a cue. You call the dog, the dog runs and hides when he predicts you’re going to give hm a bath, or you ask the dog to sit and he sits, because he predicts the best things happen when he responds to your cue. My clients tell me that they say, “we’re going to see Jenny!” and the dogs get all excited about it, because they predict playgroup. They see you pick up the leash, the predict a walk. They think about the future. How far into the “future” they can imagine is another question, and neither of us has the answer to that, and I’m sure it varies amongst dogs.
I call the whole field behavior science. And I call the activity of analyzing behavior, behavioral analysis, or applied behavioral analysis if you are trying not just to analyze, but to influence the behavior.
Why Freddy stopped scavenging when you praised the scavenging? The scavenging wasn’t reinforcing enough for him to continue to scavenge while you were praising him. What did he do when he stopped scavenging? Come to you? He has a history of reinforcement, and was predicting good things if he comes to you while you are praising him.
Jenny, just out of curiosity, how would you explain my dog’s reaction to the vacuum cleaner? She had always been afraid of it, and would get wound up when I turn it on, and then try to attack it. Then I got her to start barking at it, and then she stopped trying to attack it, and now she just ignores it.
Also, with my 3 dogs, we have a very specific routine when I leave the house. I get 3 pieces of carrots, and they all run to their crates and get inside, waiting for me to give them their carrots. This is something I do every single day, and reinforce every single time. However, there are those occasional times where I may take one of them with me for a ride in the car. I give absolutely no physical cues to them. The routine is exactly the same as normal. Since they are good off leash, I don’t have a leash in my hand that would otherwise signal that I am taking one of them. I grab the carrots from the fridge, I turn around and they are all gone, already downstairs in their crates. Yet, when I get downstairs to the room where the crates are, Jackie, who is usually the one I take if I want a ride along bud, will be standing at the door, not sitting in her crate. Even though the activity of going to her crate when I pull out a carrot is so ingrained and reinforced in her, how does she know that I am going to take her with me?
Also, if I am in the bathroom downstairs, and Jackie is lying on her bed. While I am in the bathroom, I may decide to go to my computer which is on the same floor, or I might go upstairs to watch TV or something. If I am going to stay downstairs and work on my computer, she just stays in her bed. If I am going to go upstairs, she will be standing by the bathroom door, at the foot of the stairs, waiting for me to finish whatever I’m doing so she can walk up with me. Again, I give absolutely no cues to this. I only think about where I want to go, and then she responds accordingly before I’m even finished doing whatever I’m doing in the bathroom. I may be brushing my teeth, and while I’m still brushing them, decide that I’m going to go upstairs. And there she is, standing at the foot of the stairs. I am brushing my teeth and decide to stay downstairs, and when I come out of the bathroom she is still lying in her bed. I find these behaviors and responses fascinating, as she seems to respond to my thoughts and feelings, even when she’s not in the same room. Just curious about how you might explain those situations.
Sounds like at first she wasn’t used to that vaccuum, so she was scared (averse) and wanted to chase it away. But then she became habituated to it, barking at it was kinda fun, so she became classically conditioned to the vaccuum cleaner, and it just wasn’t aversive nor that reinforcing to bark at it. So, the behavior extinquished. Just normal dog behavior.
Sounds like your dogs certainly predict the future there! You oprobably are delivering lots of subtle cues. People often don’t recognize their cues. My dogs notice even if I just start walking around a little bit faster, they can tell I’m going somewhere.
When you say you deliver absolutely no cues, you are telling me just that you aren’t aware of any cues that you might be delivering. I can’t know from here how that would even be possible. You’d have to be extremely stealthful to deliver no cues. More likely, you are delivering cues. Yes, of course she responds to your thoughts and feelings. I am sure that is exactly what is happening. Subtle manifestations of your thoughts and feelings are stimuli she reads as cues. My dogs brains don’t work like mine does, so they can’t really know my thoughts, they don’t know if I’m thinking about my sister, or what a sister is or anything, but they know if I’m happy or sad or cold or sick and going upstairs or downstairs or getting ready to eat a chicken dinner. They pick up on all that for sure. I love your examples of how dogs do make predictions, based on evidence that they collect from their environment….
It makes sense to me to call the occurrence a cue and/or energy. My dog always seems to know when I’m going to go outside as she runs to the door and looks at it. However, sometimes she runs over to the door even though I had no intention (didn’t think about it and didn’t) of going outside. Did I walk a little faster, change my posture or do something else? There must have been some sort of cue and/or a change in my energy for her to get up from her comfy position.
I am in no way an expert in any approach to dog training but reinforcement or rewards seem to have some flaws to me. It seems as if some trainers are so stuck within the reward box that they will force various occurrences into this paradigm. For example, I have heard some of these trainers state that yelling at a dog when they are “misbehaving” is rewarding the behavior. I can’t understand how this is rewarding a dog. It seems clear to me that we are creating additional tension which only increases the dogs need to “misbehave.” Of course all of my logic could be wrong because, to use the cliché, nothing is as it seems. If so, I would like to hear more.
I have one final response to the former comment that spoke about making tons of money…with poor training skills. This particular comment irked me as everything on this website is free, and you can even email Kevin with questions and he will graciously answer them free of charge. Question after question is continually answered to help people. After several emails from myself, I had to offer to pay something as I began to feel guilty. And how would you know that the training skills are poor? I think that comment was not called for. I’m curious, are you reading and posting on this site because you are interested in NDT and want to incorporate it somehow, or are you just here to fight it?
Interesting Jenny, because I would say that Jackie is FEELING what I’m going to do, rather than predicting the future per se. Now, I can certainly think about something in the future and have a thought about it, which creates a feeling in me, and she picks up on the feeling, which she then responds to through action. I don’t think she has an actual idea or thought about what’s going to happen next. I don’t think that she or the other dogs are predicting the future when it comes to getting carrots in their crates. I think they’re reacting to past, physical memories and emotions of getting carrots in the past. So they’re not predicting what the future holds, rather they’re reliving a past experience, which then looks like they’re predicting the future.
I think that’s an important distinction, because on the surface it looks very much like they are predicting a future event. But, just as I can’t predict how I am going to feel about something in the future until I experience it, neither can dogs predict it either. And this is where the fundamental differences in philosophy become apparent. Because behaviorism seems to be suggesting that dogs are thinking the same way we do, whereas Natural Dog Training believes that dogs are feeling their way through the world. And you can’t have a feeling based on what the future holds, you can only have a feeling based on what’s going on right now. But the past can influence how you feel, if those feelings are triggered by an event or stimulus. Like carrots being pulled from the fridge. My dogs aren’t looking into the future, if anything, they’re living in the past. But even that isn’t totally true. They’re actually reliving the past in the present moment.
I guess I still don’t see how that answers the question.
“But then she became habituated to it, barking at it was kinda fun, so she became classically conditioned to the vaccuum cleaner…”
WHY was it fun? What exactly was it about the barking that it made it THE gateway to fixing the problem? And how do you know that it was even ‘fun’? It could have been a release, it could have been ‘fill-in-the-blank’… It just sounds like there are a lot of assumptions to get the end result, and that’s what I think NDT is trying to point out, among other things. Plus, people call for science and evidence, but then what is your measurement for the amount of FUN a dog is having?
At any rate, glad to see the discussion! I have to agree with Alec about the money thing, although I think Jenny may have been referring to Cesar as being the one with poor training skills. At least that’s how I read it.
Sang, Your comment was very clear and I’ve cut and pasted it into my NDT “keepers” quotes in my training log. Thanks!
An important excerpt from Dean Radin’s “The Conscious Universe”:
In science, the acceptance of new ideas follows a predictable, four-stage sequence. In Stage 1, skeptics confidently proclaim that the idea is impossible because it violates the Laws of Science. This stage can last from years to centuries, depending on how much the idea challenges conventional wisdom. In Stage 2, skeptics reluctantly concede that the idea is possible, but it is not very interesting and the claimed effects are extremely weak. Stage 3 begins when the mainstream realizes that the idea is not only important, but its effects are much stronger and more pervasive than previously imagined. Stage 4 is achieved when the same critics who used to disavow any interest in the idea begin to proclaim that they thought of it first. Eventually, no one remembers that the idea was once considered a dangerous heresy.
Yasi
JRY: I focus on … behavior I can see, not try to say what the dog is thinking.
Yet predicting the future is a form of thinking; in fact it’s a hypothetical form. So while you say you don’t try to say what the dog is thinking, you actually do. And that’s understandable. It’s an automatic reflex in human beings to project rational thought onto non-human animals, even onto non-living things1.
JRY: a dog tries a behavior, experiences a consequence
How does he “try” a behavior? If he’s “trying” it that has to mean he has to have some idea in his mind of how it might work out for him, correct? He would have to have some kind of hypothetical construct of what the behavior might or might not get him in that situation. Otherwise the behavior isn’t being “tried” out, it’s just random.
But let’s reduce that idea down a bit. Say a dog is interested in getting a piece of food out of a puzzle toy. He wants to eat that food. So he tries to get it. To our way of thinking—seen from outside the dog’s experience—he’s “trying a behavior.” That’s pretty clear to us. But does the dog see what he’s doing as “trying a behavior?” Wouldn’t he have to know what “try” and “behavior” mean in order for him to see it that way? Would the thought balloon over the dog’s head read, “Let me try this behavior to see if it works. Oh, well, that didn’t work, let me try this next behavior?” Or would it be more like, “Want food, can’t get it, want food, can’t get it?”
As for learning through consequences, again that’s a human way of looking at the dog’s experience. But again, is the thought balloon, “Oh, I see! If I tip the toy like this I can get the food out. That’s the answer to the mental question I’ve been asking myself?” Or is it more like, “Ummm, got food.” Certainly, if he works the puzzle a few times he’s going to get the knack of getting the food out and go to that “behavior” more quickly. But is that a thought process or is it simply a combination of physical and emotional memory?
Here’s a clip from a blog entry I wrote in July of last year:
Even the stentor, a single-celled organism, is supposedly capable of learning to avoid slightly noxious substance called carmine through a kind of trial and error method. This initially happens in such a way that it’s obviously a biochemical reaction; this is a protozoan, after all. (Its behavior was first observed and recorded in 1906 by H. S. Jennings.)
When the carmine grains are introduced into the stentor’s environment, the first response is no response at all. The organism doesn’t react. Then, after a bit, the organism’s structure sort of bends away from the source of the irritant. That’s obviously a matter of biochemistry. When that doesn’t work, the stentor begins to reverse the motion of its ciliae, moving the substance away from its body. And if that doesn’t get results, the stentor contracts itself into its own feeding tube, interrupting its current “meal.” That trick usually solves the problem if none of the others haven’t.
So?
So this is a protozoa, and we wouldn’t naturally expect a single-cell organism to be changed by its experience, would we? It can’t really learn which of these behaviors—the contractions—was ultimately the most effective, can it? And yet let a little time pass, introduce the irritating substance again, and the little guy doesn’t go back to square one—ignoring the substance—or step two—bending away from it—or step three—reversing the movement of its ciliae. No, it goes straight to step four and begins contracting in on itself, doing so quite violently now, as if it had learned from its previous experience that the more violent the contractions are, the quicker and better the results. And it does this even though that particular behavioral pattern prevents it from being able to feed.
Would we for a second consider the idea that the stentor made a positive mental association with the one behavior that worked to relieve its irritation the first time, and that that’s why it immediately went straight to that behavior when the substance was re-introduced? Of course not; it’s a single-celled organism. If there was any sort of change that took place in its internal structure it has nothing to do with memory (not as we know it), or any sort of thought process. It’s got to be the result of a simple biochemical transformation of some sort. In fact, on a very simple level it’s solely about reducing tension. The carmine creates stress on the stentor’s simple biological system. Each of its behaviors are simply reactions to the stress and are designed to get rid of [that stress] and return [the system] to homeostasis. The “learning” that takes place is, again, due purely to a temporary chemical transformation.
And how do single cells undergo chemical transformation? Through an energy exchange. In fact … whenever a human or a dog learns something new, a more complicated and sophisticated form of energy exchanges takes place: one neuron sends energy to another, which sends that energy to another, and on up the line. And the main reason it’s more complicated is that there are more cells involved. On a cellular level, it’s still pretty simple.2
So, if single-celled organism can “mimic” learning by consequences, what does that tell us about dogs?
JRY: But and then the dog thinks, (not in words, but in an emotional way of knowing) “aha! When I bark, that works out well. so, bark, bark, bark!” or whatever.
Certainly a change takes place in terms of the dog’s interaction with the environment. And when viewed from the outside-in the barking is a catalyst for that change. The question is does the dog know that there’s been a change, or does he just feel it? Helen Keller said that before she learned sign language she had no ability to compare one mental state to another—one needs the use of symbolic language to make comparisons. So when a dog experiences change, he can’t experience it on a mental level. It has to be purely emotional, and it has to take place totally in the moment.
JRY: Whatever the dog means when he thinks “that works out well” … that is reinforcement. He gets what he wants.
Yes, but is the dog aware of wanting what he wants or does he just feel it? Cognitive scientists have a word for the first type of thought: metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Granted this would be a simpler form of metacognition in that the dog is only thinking about what he’s feeling, not thinking about what he’s thinking. But it’s still a pretty big stretch to believe that dogs can consciously think about or be consciously aware of what’s going on in their minds or bodies on any level.
And if the dog isn’t consciously aware of what he wants, how could he be aware that he got what he wanted? He can’t even be aware of the fact that he feels good, or better than he did before, or different in any way. But if we look at the event as an emotional flow, say the way water gets blocked by a beaver dam, and how the pressure builds until the water finds a way to flow over or around it, we’d be much closer to the way a dog experiences “getting what he wants.” Flow>blockage>tension>release.
JRY: How do I know that the barking behavior is being reinforced, and that the dog is getting what he wants? He barks. If he chooses NOT to bark, that means that barking isn’t being reinforced
Now who’s engaging in circular logic? Don’t you see how tautological that is?
JRY: Lee, your dog predicts the future and remembers the past every time he responds to a cue. You call the dog, the dog runs and hides when he predicts you’re going to give hm a bath, or you ask the dog to sit and he sits, because he predicts the best things happen when he responds to your cue.
Others here have already discussed this, but here’s an important clue as to what’s really going on when you think a dog is predicting the future. Sensory cues stimulate emotional memory2, causing a dog or even a human being to be carried away, back to that previous moment in time. This is something I learned years ago in acting workshop: if you try to recall the emotions you felt during a highly charged moment in your past, your brain/ego won’t let you; it doesn’t want your psyche to be put into a vulnerable position again. But if you simply do an inventory of the sensory details surrounding the event, the emotions will come flooding back and you’ll feel as if you were actually in that moment once again. This isn’t just Stanislavsky, it’s a physiological fact3. Your brain will take over again, but if you’re a good actor (and I never was, really), you’ll be able to use those emotions for whatever scene you’re doing in the present. Dogs, however, don’t have the advantage of standing outside their emotions or understanding time in a linear manner. So when sensory cues create strong emotions in a dog, they plunge him back into the past, they don’t enable him to predict the future.
Yes, your clients’ dogs will act happy and excited when they hear your name. But it’s not because the dogs are predicting the future. It’s just because that particular sensory cue (your name) stimulates strong positive emotional memories for the dogs. They don’t why they’re excited (that would be metacognition again), or even that they feel good (more metacognition), they just do.
LCK
1) From Marc Bekoff, at PsychologyToday.com: Recent research by Andrea Heberlein and Ralph Adolphs shows that a part of the brain called the amygdala is used when we impart intention and emotions to inanimate objects or events…Their research suggests that the “human capacity for anthropomorphizing draws on some of the same neural systems as do basic emotional responses.” My reading of this research and my own experience with a wide variety of animals is that “We feel, therefore we anthropomorphize.” And we’re programmed to see humanlike mentality in events where it cannot possibly be involved.”
2) http://leecharleskelleysblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/mental-associations-v-reduction-of.html (more on the stentor and the myth of mental associations)
3) http://www.livescience.com/health/top_10_about_you-1.html (click on #9)
Just to answer Alec, no I was referring to the dog whiseper, and not talking about Kevin Behan when I was saying that the dog whisperer makes a lot of money and he isn’t a great trainer. I agree with you Alec, that Kevin seems to be a pretty sincere and generous guy.
Sang, if you’re saying that just as you can’t predict the future, dogs can’t predict the future. of course I agree with that. Dogs are not able to predict the future any better than we can, that’s for sure. But they think. Not exactly like we think, but of course dogs are capable of thinking. Dogs have brains and bodies, and brains and bodies think and feel. No question about that. You can say it’s feeling, when a dog feels his way into the food cabinet, or when a dog plays a game with another dog. Dogs are very emotional beings. But I work with dogs full-time, and so I see a lot of different dogs and I get to know them over longish periods of time, and they do all kinds of smart things that if people were to do them, we’d say, “that’s good thinking.” I don’t care what words you want to use for it. Call if “that’s smart feelings.” I don’t care.
JRY: Why Freddy stopped scavenging when you praised the scavenging? The scavenging wasn’t reinforcing enough for him to continue to scavenge while you were praising him.
Why wasn’t the scavenging reinforcing enough? And what, exactly, was the praise reinforcing? It can’t be that the praise reinforced the behavior of coming to me. That would be putting the effect before the cause. What the praise actually reinforced, was the non-scavenging behavior, specifically of dropping the chicken breast out of his mouth. But wait, even that puts the effect before the cause.
JRY: What did he do when he stopped scavenging? Come to you? He has a history of reinforcement, and was predicting good things if he comes to you while you are praising him.
So now instead of sticking with the technically correct model of learning — that it’s only a matter of what behaviors are or aren’t being reinforced — you’re adding a thought process to what happened: Freddie is now predicting things through some innate mental process.
In actual fact, Freddie wasn’t coming to me because he was predicting what would happen next. He had no “idea” what was going to happen next. One minute he had a fresh, juicy piece of chicken in his mouth, the next he was coming toward me, wagging his tail.
Don’t tell me what he was thinking. What was he feeling?
You’re also forgetting that while he came to me the first time this happened, he never produced that behavior during any of the subsequent times I praised him while he was scavenging. I simply praised him each time, and he gave up the behavior. How do you explain that?
JRY: I work with dogs full-time, and so I see a lot of different dogs and I get to know them over longish periods of time, and they do all kinds of smart things that if people were to do them, we’d say, “that’s good thinking.” I don’t care what words you want to use for it. Call if “that’s smart feelings.” I don’t care.
Yes dogs exhibit some pretty amazing abilities, some of which seem to be pretty advanced, cognitively speaking. What you need to do is learn how not to project humanlike thought processes onto those behaviors. That’s what you’re doing. That’s what we alldo until we learn how to take a step back and try to see canine behavior from the dog’s pov.
I suggest you read Rational Animals? by Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds. It gives the reader a detailed, carefully written account of what the various types of cognition are, and what kind of tests serious cognitive scientists use to determine whether various species have these abilities, etc. Another good read is the paper, “Darwin’s Mistake: Explaining the Discontinuity Between Human and Non-Human Minds” by Penn et al. It’s currently hard to find, but worth looking for.
It might help.
LCK
LCK, you can call what I called “predicting” thinking or feeling or conditioning, I don’t care what you call it. The dog is acting on it.
You keep asking me how I would explain this or that, and I would explain any of it by saying, you have a story, and you can tell your story any way you want to tell it. But I can’t explain the combination of your behavior plus your dog’s behavior if I haven’t seen it with my own eyes, because your story may be inaccurate or missing something important, and very often when people tell me stories about their dogs on the phone (for example) when I work with their actual dogs I see something entirely different from what was reported on the phone.
That’s cool how freddy was able to scavenge and find fresh juicy pieces of chicken. Usually we don’t find fresh juicy pieces of chicken laying around.
Hi Lee – re the above “It can’t be that the praise reinforced the behavior of coming to me. That would be putting the effect before the cause.”- are you saying that because you praised Freddy whilst he was scavenging your praise cannot have been for coming to you because the reiforcement of praise came before the behaviour of coming, as per the operant conditioning model? I agree. Are you saying that your praise changed the dogs emotional feelings and hence his behviour changed as well?
Re the following – “What the praise actually reinforced, was the non-scavenging behavior, specifically of dropping the chicken breast out of his mouth. But wait, even that puts the effect before the cause.” – are you saying here that under the operant conditioning model praising the behaviour of not scavenging would be technically correct, under that model, had your praise started after he stopped scavenging, but because it started before he had stopped scavenging it cannot fit that model?
JRY: What did he do when he stopped scavenging? Come to you? He has a history of reinforcement, and was predicting good things if he comes to you while you are praising him.
Lee re the above are you saying that the dog cannot predict good things happening to him based on a history of reinforcement while praising him? Would you say this is more the dog having good feelings when you behave like this? A subtle but distinct difference. I guess R+ trainers would call that the pavlovian component.
What about obedience competitors who get precise animated heelwork in competition, in a specific position, on command, without a toy or food, but initially trained on a history of feeding the dog treats/toys in this position following the model of operant conditioning. How do you explain that behaviour in your model?
Mark
Don’t get me wrong Jenny. I do know where you’re coming from. And to you this may seem like semantics and just different ways of saying the same thing. But I guess I do care what we call it, because those small differences in how we label things are critical to our understanding of them. Feeling and thinking are completely different experiences. And when a dog “thinks”, he’s thinking in a way different than the way we do, using his emotional intellect, rather than logic. And to me, that is an incredibly important distinction.
I think you’re maybe misinterpreting all of this as a belief that dogs aren’t intelligent. No one here is saying that. We’re actually saying the opposite. Dogs are EXTREMELY intelligent, but in a way that goes against the way we think and interact with the world and those around us. If you were to have to rely only on your emotions and feelings rather than your intellectual, logic based mind, what would your experience with the world be? I’d venture to say that it would be very different, and that you would do things that you just wouldn’t do now, and approach every situation differently than you would today.
We humans obviously have a tremendous capacity to intellectualize about things. However, look at how much our subconscious brains, i.e. our reptile brains, the brain that drives our pleasure centers, can override our thinking brains. And we’re mammals that have a tremendous ability to think through our feelings and override them if we want. The fact that we’re even having this discussion proves how intellectually motivated we are. But how often does our intellectual, logical mind actually override our emotions in our everyday lives? If you really study human behavior, it happens quite rarely. How often do we tell ourselves things like, “I need to start working out”, or “I know I shouldn’t eat this cookie, but it just tastes so good”. How many people engage in self destructive, unhealthy behaviors despite the fact that they “know better”. If we humans, the ones with the most capacity to override how we feel about things can’t do it, then what chance do dogs have? Which is why I say it’s important to acknowledge the fact that feelings are the primary driver for them. Because if we don’t acknowledge that fact, then we’ll always approach things from a human point of view. Yet we as humans aren’t even capable of really approaching ourselves from a human point of view, since we’re still slaves to our animal brains, aka emotion and feeling, so how can we say that dogs are “thinking” animals, when the most dominant thinking animal on the planet rarely actually “thinks” their way through their day.
Mark, in regards to your question: “What about obedience competitors who get precise animated heelwork in competition, in a specific position, on command, without a toy or food, but initially trained on a history of feeding the dog treats/toys in this position following the model of operant conditioning. How do you explain that behaviour in your model?”
* What’s revealing in such a dog’s obedience is that its lesson is predicated on a specific template that all learning must conform to. 1) What an animal learns is always as a function of attraction, so when someone might praise a dog when it’s doing something inappropriate, it potentially can feel more attracted to the person and therefore less attracted to what it was doing before (presupposing the person had built up a strong force of attraction with their dog.) When I used to give police dog seminars, one of the big problems to address is a poor “Out.” The dog is biting my arm, and the problem was that when its handler approaches to command Out, the dog starts to become all frenzied and bites harder and growls and resists coming off the sleeve on command. So I coached the handler to make squeaky, happy, silly praise (this can be hard to convince a police handler to do) and invariably the dog would spit out the sleeve. The dog could now feel its handler because it was attracted to him and therefore could easily let go. It was no longer using the sleeve as a “ground” to deal with the stress of its handler approaching to fight it over possession of the sleeve. 2) The fact that such a dog is animated in its heel work (as opposed to any other species of animal taught to perform the same behaviors through reinforcements) is precisely because dogs go-by-feel, by which I mean that the energy of attraction next elaborates into a state of alignment with said object of attraction. (In other words, the electrical nature of emotion once grounded into object of attraction, next evolves into its magnetic quality.) This then begets a state of physical alignment and being in alignment then induces more energy every time its handler moves. This “new energy” through “emotional induction” is the real reward for the dog, not the food or the toy that was used in the beginning. This is why a dog will perform with animation, whereas a cat or chimp will not. (Because Killer Whales and dolphins are also group hunters is why they love to perform synchronized tricks with each other and with trainer in the pool, it’s not the tangible food reward. The material objects of attraction are only a seed that jump starts the organizing principle of emotional induction through synchronized group action.) The only reason the food or the toy was so galvanizing to the dog “in drive” was because of the induction of more energy. When a state of attraction is channeled into a state of alignment, thereafter when the handler moves, the dog feels more energy and this is why its neurology and physiology is organized in the way that it is. A state of physical alignment inducing emotional energy is also why dogs love car rides and is why wolves love to hunt and also how they know how to align around the prey as a coordinated group. I should add that all animals learn according to this template of attraction/alignment, however when emotional induction kicks in, animals then become segregated according to an emotional, or carrying capacity. When this threshold is breached, then genes, instincts and habits take over and therefore they aren’t capable of what dogs are at high-rates-of-change. Because dogs are able to plug in the attraction/alignment template in man’s world of incessant change is why the dog and only the dog is capable of living with us.
So I hope this helps to clarify some of the many profound distinctions between an energy theory of learning versus a reinforcement theory.
I think maybe a difference in my perception is that I feel. All of my thinking is very “feeling.” Yes, I can add and subtract, and there is some evidence that dogs can measure, add and subtract, they can discriminate in a “thinking” sort of way, but I go by my gut feelings, and dogs do too. Emotion is ALWAYS part of a thought. I don’t separate thinking and feeling. I separate behavior I can see and measure from things I can’t see or measure. Operant conditioning and classical conditioning is ALWAYS about changing the emotion of the dog, changing the energy (the behavior). When Pavlov talks about how a dog salivates, how can anyone claim salivating is “thinking?” Pavlov didn’t and we shouldn’t, it’s just semantics and how we talk about it. One of things we often say about operant conditioning behavior is that we don’t want the dog to think about the behavior. We aim for an automatic response, sort of like when the phone rings, we automatically reach for it.
I never have a problem with teaching my dogs to drop anything. They learn that just fine using operant and classical conditioning. I say drop it, the mouth opens up, no thinking involved, just an automatic response. If my dog was eating chicken and I said, “good dog!” my dog would keep eating chicken. Personally, I think it’s NOT a good training if you say “Good dog!” and the dog immediately stops whatever it’s doing. I like my dog to keep on doing whatever it was doing when I say “good dog.”
JRY: you can call what I called “predicting” thinking or feeling or conditioning, I don’t care what you call it. The dog is acting on it.
Don’t you think it’s important to understand or try to nail down what the dog is acting on?
JRY: You keep asking me how I would explain this or that, and I would explain any of it by saying, you have a story, and you can tell your story any way you want to tell it. But I can’t explain the combination of your behavior plus your dog’s behavior if I haven’t seen it with my own eyes
This is true to a point. But the real reason you can’t explain it is because it can’t be explained through learning theory.
JRY: That’s cool how freddy was able to scavenge and find fresh juicy pieces of chicken. Usually we don’t find fresh juicy pieces of chicken laying around.
His name was Freddie. And I think both he and I were as surprised as anyone to see a fresh juicy chicken breast just lying there next to a park bench. Someone had probably brought it out for a nice lunch in the fresh air, had dropped it, and just left it there.
Mark, I think Kevin has answered your last question better than I could. You sort of answered the first couple yourself. Yes, my praise change Freddie’s emotional state, but that in itself would probably have not been enough. And yes, there was a history of what JRY would call reinforcement but what I would call physical and emotional attraction to me.
In emergent theory they say that the parts in a self-organizing system arrange themselves around “attractors.” This partially explains why there seems to be a pack leader in wolf packs when we look at the structure from the outside-in rather than from the inside-out. (The other part is that the human mind is designed to see natural phenomena this way.)
Many people with a strong behavioral science background (some with a much stronger understanding of its principles than Jenny) have said that the scavenging was extinguished due to classical conditioning (the Pavlovian element you mentioned). The problem with that explanation is that none of the behaviors involved were unconditioned responses. The scavenging was a learned (conditioned) behavior. The praise qualified as a conditioned stimulus (though all the previous conditioning Freddie had was nominally the opposite of what the praise did in that situation). So giving up the chicken breast still doesn’t make sense.
The only way it does is if we were to view both the praise and the chicken breast as negative reinforcers; they took away an unpleasant feeling the dog was having (internal tension). The praise was, for some perhaps unknown reason, simply more successful, in that moment, at taking away that feeling than the chicken breast was. But if we look at it from that pov, it would suggest that all behavior is learned through negative reinforcement — the reduction of internal tension or stress — which would collapse learning theory down to only one quadrant.
LCK
Jenny, First, given that your critique of NDT is predicated on a scientific approach, are you willing to offera distinction between the various phenomena of consciousness categorized as emotion/feelings/thoughts/instincts. Are you saying that thoughts and feelings are synonymous with each other? What about the distinction between emotion and feeling? How about emotion and instinct? What about the distinction between consciousness and all of the above? I’m not asking for a treatise, you can say that yes there are valid distinctions, and then you can offer a simple thought in the dog’s mind that stands in isolation from emotion, instinct, feeling.
Secondly, teaching a Police dog to “Out” when fighting for its life and after shots have been fired and this after a high speed chase is on an order of magnitude quite a bit higher than any other kind of Out training so don’t be so sure Operant Conditioning will cover this. Furthermore, if a police handler says “Good Boy” and the dog stops biting because the handler wants the dog to stop biting, and then “Good Boy” when the dog is fighting the criminal and the dog bites the criminal harder, how then did the dog apprehend the distinction? Could it be that the dog could feel what the handler wanted, and could it be that this capacity to feel such a want was based on where in the master prey-making hunting drive the handler inputs were being made?
Hi Kevin,
To clarify, I’m not critical of your method, I keep saying that I think you have some good ideas to contribute, but your idea that the things that work for you can’t be explained via operant and classical conditioning, where evidence and proof has been collected over and over and over, and must be explained by an entirely different system that is not proven nor provable in any scientific research, it’s silly. I don’t think you need to be a renegade to make your points.
Plenty of trainers use operant conditioning to teach “out” to schutzhund dogs, and it works fine, I also see that in high drive agility dogs too, playing intense tug, and dropping it in a millisecond when cued.
Your last questions, the “good boy” scenarios, I would have to see that in action. Video tape an example. Maybe a handler says “good boy” in different ways, one way as a release cue, and one way as conditioned encouragement, or maybe that would never happen. Or maybe the handler says “good boy” only when the dog is doing the correct thing, and so the dog continues to do the correct thing (whatever that may be). Or maybe the dog ignores “good boy” and is responding to other cues. Or maybe it’s all just a story and there is no dog and no cues, and it’s all just hypothetical.
Yes, I do think dogs pick up cues on what the handler wants. Cues are “stimuli” and the dog always has to perceive the stimuli, whether it’s a word, gesture, scent, time of day, color, article or whatever. Maybe the dog feels a touch or sees a ball or hears a tone of voice or smells nervousness or thinks “sit!”. The dog is responding to stimuli (cues).
No, I don’t think you can have emotion/feelings/thoughts/intincts distinct from each other. All these are aspects of a whole perception. So say a dog gets excited when I say “squirrel.” Dog maybe be thinking (the word “squirrel” means that thing!) as well as “feeling” (Adrenaline is started to run through my veins) as well as emotion (adrenline! Excitement!) as well as instinct (a genetic heritage that infleunces how the dog’s body works).
And consciousness is a whole topic in itself! One thing I see in operant conditioning is how that learning process increases consciousness, or self awareness. For example, the dog kicks out a back leg, and I mark it and reinforce it. The dog becomes increasingly aware of and in control of his ability to kick out a back leg (whereas before training, it happened unconsciously).
Take care, hope you enjoyed this gorgeous day,
One more thing, to Kevin, I think you are right to search for an intersection, as you say in the first line of your blog.
I’ve been out of police dog work for a while but I’d be surprised if modern trainers are training dogs to “out” by marking and clicking. I believe that would render a very confused working dog. Whereas when the “prey” is dead, the dog’s attraction to it dissipates naturally and it will willingly let go, and so working through this primal channel I believe is far more reliable than a reward based approach.
But I do appreciate your interest in my ideas and I can see that I’m not able to make distinctions that you find relevant.
Nevertheless you are making an astounding assertion that dogs think, and this immediately begs the question that no one seems willing to tackle: what are they thinking? You could just ask me to accept this premise as an article of faith and while I don’t have a problem with taking things on faith, one can’t then say that such an argument is based on science. The reason however I suspect no one is willing to fill in the thought balloon they claim is to be found above the dog’s head is because they will immediately run into self-contradicting logic loops. For example, if dogs can think, why then do we need breeds? Why not breed for the capacity to think rather than for stereotypical breed traits? If behavior is a function of learning and cues why can’t terriers be conditioned to hunt birds, pointers to tend sheep, retrievers be trained to guard? (While we’re at it, why can’t cats be cued up to herd mice?) If dogs can think, why is dog training theory preoccupied with conditioning? Kids can think and so we send them to school to learn to think (hopefully), we don’t want them to be conditioned.
I believe that mainstream science needs to resort to thinking because it is the only means it has available to account for the innate intelligence of dogs. Otherwise it must say a dog is a machine, a mindless creature of habit and instinct and this is obviously incorrect because obviously dogs are capable of creatively adaptive behavior, and they are emotionally responsive and capable. Science is stuck in a conundrum because the only way it can envision new information getting into the system via consciousness is through thinking.
On the other hand since an energy model can make distinctions between emotion, instinct, thoughts, feelings, drive, consciousness vs. self-consciousness, awareness vs. self-awareness, not to mention energy, I consider such an interpretation of behavior to be more scientific than a model which admits it can’t. Therefore it would be illogical for an energy model to be subsumed into an input/output — cue/reinforcement model that is far less comprehensive.
However I will readily agree with you that indeed today was a gorgeous day. Can’t wait for tomorrow.
Hi Kevin, we teach an “out” with operant conditioning, but don’t need a marker signal to use operant conditioning, that’s just another tool and I think most people don’t mark that behavior for very long if at all, they just condition the dog to drop it, ie, the cue “drop it” (or any cue really) takes on the conditioned reinforcement, the cue itself marking reinforcement much like a click, so dogs are very eager to hear and respond to the cue, as all cues are associated with reinforcement (I won’t go into details here) I teach my dogs to tug a stationary line (service/working purposes) so for that and other reasons I don’t use movement as the cue to tug or not tug.
You think dogs don’t think? When you ask what are they thinking, that’s sort of like asking, what are the humans thinking? It all depends! And I think of breeds as being analogous to races in human beings, the tall people are better at basketball (usually, not always), and some people are better at swimming or music or whatever. Don’t get me going on breed clubs! I really think the AKC cultivates a sort of fascism which I don’t like, and I don’t really believe in breeding as we know it now.
I do think some breeders breed for a capacity to think, but it is much harder to do than to breed for coat color, which is visible. But border collies sure have evolved to become quite the thinkers. I swim long distances, and my fellow swimming friends and I often talk about how we condition ourselves to swim in increasingly cold water, in increasingly weird/could be scary situations, for increasing distances. In school, children are conditioned to sit for increasingly long durations to respond to bells and teachers and all sorts of stuff, conditioned to write longer essays and to tolerate increasing social pressure. I notice I am not well conditioned to city life, and I’m saying please don’t get hung up on the word “conditioning,” as though it is saying “you can’t think.” It’s not saying that. We condition ourselves and our animals, life conditions us, that is how we learn and that is how teachers teach. We expose and accustom ourselves and our students to new experiences and consequences associated with engaging in those experiences. Operant conditioning is definitely NOT saying that animals are machines, it’s more saying as the Buddhists say, that everything is interconnected. You’re saying that too. That behavior doesn’t happen in a vaccuum, and that the environment influences behavior, that an animal does not invent his or her (or my) behavior independently of the entire environment, but that the world and other animals influence and shape my behavior and influence and shape your behavior.
I like your energy idea, to me that fits into the operant conditioning model. So that’s enough writing! It’s warm out even now! Take care,
For anyone interested in exploring what serious cognitive scientists have to say on the differences between various cognitive abilities — thought, intention, rationality, instinct, and emotion — I’ve added a page to my website where you can download some pdf files on these topics:
http://0189e47.netsolhost.com/linksdvdsetc/papersstudiesetc.html
LCK
When I was a boy I saw our GSD catch a woodchuck, fling it into the air and heard its backbone snap. The chuck hit the ground dead as a doornail and the dog left it alone. No reinforcement necessary. I later learned to use this innate sequence of emotion to train a police dog to “out.” It’s a drive sequence. Over the course of training I increase the amount of energy that this drive can conduct, a learning theorist would call that conditioning, but I would say I’m strengthening the “feeling” to the point that it can exist in an unnatural context. In other words, I’m channeling energy and this is how behavior is “conditioned.” I also recognize that I’m not creating the feeling, it exists innately I am merely eliciting it and strengthening it to suit a domestic service.
Also in the interest of brevity, I don’t cover all contingencies but I trust the essence of my point should be clear. Obviously I’m not saying that because children can think, therefore they cannot be conditioned because of course they are indeed conditioned in many ways. My point is that because we universally acknowledge that children can and do think, we therefore don’t send our children to school, or raise them, in the fundamental hope that they will end up being conditioned. We want them to end up thinking for themselves. Therefore, if dogs are capable of thinking, why does OC focus on conditioning? Why not focus on thinking? This is an inherent contradiction.
JRY said: “You think dogs don’t think? When you ask what are they thinking, that’s sort of like asking, what are the humans thinking? It all depends!”
What does it depend on? Yes it is true that the thoughts of human beings depend on many things but we don’t evade the question by saying “it depends.” When someone is playing basketball we are able to speculate meaningfully on what he is thinking. We know he has an eye on the clock, there are elements of a game plan in mind, after two quick fouls he thinks the ref is out to get him; his jump shot isn’t working, the team is in second place so he knows this is an especially critical game and so on. Furthermore, this capacity for thought is independent of the player’s talent or size or race. It is inarguable that breeders are selecting for traits, and not thinking. If this were true then we could cross an exceptionally smart terrier with a GSD and improve the herding capacity of their progeny but this will never be the case.
As soon as one introduces the notion of thinking there are a million sub-questions that need to be addressed. What is the relationship between thoughts and instincts-drive, emotion, feelings? Are dogs driven by thoughts or instincts, an essential question for any training regime? Currently these are left hanging.
JRY “I’m saying please don’t get hung up on the word “conditioning,” as though it is saying “you can’t think.”
In science terms cannot be used indeterminately otherwise you end up with oxymorons. By definition conditioning is the absence of thinking. They are not synonyms. If one has to think about something, then they are not conditioned because the possibility remains that a thought can override the conditioning. The Secret Service is conditioned to expose themselves to gunfire. The President better hope they don’t have to think about it. And in the example you offer, a person can condition themselves to swim in progressively colder water or shark infested waters. But then perhaps they hear on the news of an Arctic freeze up coming, or of a particularly gruesome shark attack in Malibu. Then all of a sudden the water seems too cold, or a dark shape is seen cresting a wave and all the counter-conditioning to sharks unravels with the appearance of that glob of seaweed. This can’t happen with a properly channeled dog. The environment always conforms to the strength of its feeling once it’s fully enabled.
So the fundamental difference between my model and learning theory is that in mainstream science, there is the environment and then there is the individual. Whereas in my model, there is the environment, the individual and energy. And in my model individuals and the environment self-organize around principles of energy and these principles are the mechanism of interconnectedness and constitute an auto-tuning/feedback dynamic. This is where we must look for the true determinants of behavior.
I do appreciate that this discussion helps to clarify points of distinction but I still want to know what a Border collie chasing a ball is thinking about.
No, conditioning is not by definition the absence of thinking. Here’s one definition I found in a dicitonary: 1 conditioning
a learning process in which an organism’s behavior becomes dependent on the occurrence of a stimulus in its environment.
Here’s a better definition: n. Psychology
A process of behavior modification by which a subject comes to associate a desired behavior with a previously unrelated stimulus.
By definition a conditioned response is not only a behavior that’s produced by an organism without any thought process (it’s an autonomic response to a stimulus), it’s also, by definition, a response that the organism produces without any choice in the matter. Did Pavlov’s dogs have any choice when they salivated when the bell rang? Did they have any thought process that caused them to salivate? What about the experiment where Skinner bragged about getting pigeons to wear their beaks down to nubs? They had no choice in the matter or they would’ve stopped pecking at some point.
Here’s another thing to consider: our beliefs are what prevent us from seeing the truth. In other words, ideologies are actually designed to prevent people from thinking.
LCK
Another way of saying it might be, do dogs ‘understand’ cause and effect?
From my understanding this is the main ‘bone’ of contention NDT has with behavioral science. It seems clear that those in the behavioral science camp believe cause and effect is, at least to a degree, understood by the dog. But this is an assumption of the human mind.
If I sit then I get a cookie. If I sit more often I should get more cookies. Although, it looks like this true on first glance, this would require a great deal of ‘thinking’ because the concept of mental time travel is introduced.
NDT is articulating another model that makes sense of this phenomenon without the use of time. This is Kevin’s immediate moment theory.
If all behavior is a function of attraction and physical memory, the computed output (behavior) is an interpolation of past events (experienced physically by the dog) coupled to a state of attraction. To the dog that physical state is what produced the cookie. Not the behavior!
I agree that the concept of operant conditioning is not about thought process, and does not require thought process. That’s not true of putting a behavior on cue, ie, when you get to the stage of establishing discriminative stimuli. Dogs need to be thinking in order to hear the difference between words like “back, flat, sit, down, bow.” You were arguing that operant conditioning is all about thinking, and I wasn’t saying that. I also wasn’t saying that dogs don’t think.
I’m not saying OC is all about thinking, but rather that it claims dogs are thinking and then can’t back up the claim. Discriminating between stimuli is not necessarily about thinking either. For example, the olfactory and optical processes as well as the immune system and cell membrane permeability discriminate between various stimuli and are capable of doing so without thinking and furthermore are capable of shifting values in accord with context without thinking as well. In my model, dogs are able to assign an electromagnetic vibration to every stimuli and precisely calibrated to its most subtle nuance and this is the basis of their ability to discriminate between things, just as the sense of smell works. Training a dog to discriminate doesn’t mean training him to think about things differently, but rather to assign different emotional values to things so that the electromagnetic value (ratio of hunger to balance) shifts in the dog’s perception of the thing. This is why training requires repetition, to deepen the channel so that the movement of energy through that channel hardens the emotional value enough so that the dog can then apply it generally rather than specifically.
I would still like to know what that Border collie is thinking.
Kevin i am seeking clarification to the following you wrote above; “When I used to give police dog seminars, one of the big problems to address is a poor “Out.” The dog is biting my arm, and the problem was that when its handler approaches to command Out, the dog starts to become all frenzied and bites harder and growls and resists coming off the sleeve on command. So I coached the handler to make squeaky, happy, silly praise (this can be hard to convince a police handler to do) and invariably the dog would spit out the sleeve. The dog could now feel its handler because it was attracted to him and therefore could easily let go. It was no longer using the sleeve as a “ground” to deal with the stress of its handler approaching to fight it over possession of the sleeve”.
The letting go problem as you mention above, is not uncommon during the training of Police dogs. My question is did the dogs spit out the sleeve before the “out” command and in response to “the handler making squeaky, happy, silly praise” or was the sequence the “out” command came first and then the “squeaky, happy, silly praise”.
Mark
To know what the border collie is thinking, design an experiment, such as this one:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/03/AR2007060300960.html
The “selective imitation” test you posted the link to was very badly designed. The dogs’ owners were there to give the dog cues on how to behave. In fact most of the experiments done by Fredericke Range are. Read Kevin’s article “Do Dogs Have a Sense of Fairness?”
http://naturaldogtraining.com/articles/do-dogs-have-a-sense-of-fairness/
or mine
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/my-puppy-my-self/200904/tuning-in-your-dogs-emotions
Also, Jenny, instead of pulling definitions out of a dictionary and posting links to badly-done studies we’re already aware of, why not just answer the question? You said your dog has to have some sort of thought process to put his back leg out in a certain way that you’ve trained him to. What is the dog thinking when he does that?
It’s a simple question.
LCK
I get that it may be hard to answer what a dog is thinking because of variables, or circumstances, or a thought process is just that, – a PROCESS, – I don’t think anyone is in disagreement there. But the point is that a whole theory is based off of something that can’t really be answered, – whatever the reason may be.
Forget momentarily about whether or not we believe dogs can or can’t think. The main thing is how much validity can there be in a theory with it’s whole thesis based on something that can’t be answered? In EVERY circumstance, with EVERY variable? That’s the purpose of a theory – to explain everything! Not to say that the theory can’t contribute anything, but it seems evident that a flaw exists. And while I certainly understand wanting to provide relevant information, the task does lie on you to provide the data, not to tell someone it’s there but to run the experiment and find out for themselves. I imagine this experiment would have more to do with the ‘group harmony’ Kevin talks about than it does with thinking? This was an interesting quote too (from the same article):
“It’s so easy for the human mind to look at a dog doing something like this and force our human way of thinking about it on the dog,” said Daniel J. Povinelli, a cognitive scientist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Also, how do the ‘thinking models’ explain all the other abilities dogs have? Sniffing out cancer? Predicting seizures? Could they really be THINKING there’s a tumor – wouldn’t you have to say then that they can interpret scientific evidence in order to come to that conclusion? Or would it be some kind of… subsconscious telepathy?? It almost seems suggesting there’s thinking involved here is actually dumbing down the ability.
Hi Mark, I posted an entry in my blog about the Out training. Hope it clarifies your question.
You guys are so funny with your rhetoric!