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| A Dog, Some Ducks, and a Dentist |
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Myth #3 - All Animals Learn the Same Way
Dog trainer Patricia McConnell wrote in Bark Magazine
not long ago, “The process of learning is pretty much the same
whether you’re a pigeon, a planarian [flatworm] or, come to think of
it, a philosophy professor.”
Doesn't that strike you as a little off? (As a writer I have to point out that it's also a bad attempt at alliteration, since technically speaking the "p" "pl" and "ph" sounds are not alliterative; a better choice would have been "dogs, ducks, and dentists.") Since McConnell is an expert on dogs, shouldn't some attention be given to the fact that dogs are motivated by certain types of incentives that would have little or no effect on pigeons and philosophy professors, or ducks and dentists? Certainly when training either dogs or cats or pigs to do circus tricks, you would tend to rely on food rewards. But when we train our pet dogs should food always be the focal point of training? What about games like fetch and tug-of-war?
Of course what McConnell means
is that when an animal of any kind finds that a
behavior produces positive results, it will have a tendency to choose
that behavior over and over again. And I agree with that. But the implication here is that there is only one type of training that works for all dogs (i.e., the "cookie-cutter" approach), and that all training should be based strictly on behavioral science. But for most people that conjures up images of an albino rat locked inside a Skinner box. The rats only motivation for learning was supposedly to get a food pellet. But dogs aren't rats and we don't train them inside boxes in a research lab.
"Yes," behavioral scientists would argue, "But whether the incentive is a treat or being given a ball to chase, it still boils down to one thing: positive reinforcement." Again, I agree. But when we get locked in to the idea that behavioral science has all the answers we don't keep our minds open to other possibilities. And for far too many trainers, food is considered the universal reward. And that keeps some dogs from ever being fully trained.
The Torturous Origins of “Positive Training”
The
idea that animals learn through positive consequences comes from
experiments done by B.F. Skinner in the 1930s, where he half-starved
some rats and pigeons, locked them inside boxes, then waited to see if
they’d learn to press or peck a bar in order to obtain a food pellet.
Eventually most of the animals pressed or pecked the bar, found out
that doing so got them goodies, and began doing it again and again with
the presumed expectation of getting more goodies.
Skinner called
this “operant conditioning” and expanded on it by providing the animals
with a “discriminate stimulus,” meaning the food would only be given
when a light was flashing, for example, which is akin, on a very remote
level, to linking a pup’s behavior to a verbal cue. (Remember, you’re
not training your puppy while he’s locked in a box, in a controlled
laboratory setting; you’re doing it in the real world with thousands of
variables that you’re not aware of, and your dog probably is).
Skinner
was quite pleased with himself following one experiment where, after
he’d stopped supplying food pellets to some pigeons—just to see how
long it took before they’d stop pecking the bar, even though the light
was still flashing—the birds kept at it till they wore their beaks down
to nubs. Skinner never achieved that same level of “learning” with
rats, because for birds, pecking is a predictable fixed-action pattern
(also called a modal action pattern), related to food; it’s more or
less stamped into their DNA. Rats, meanwhile, don’t have an instinctive
“bar-pressing” behavior in their genes, which is why Skinner never
achieved that same level of success (if you can call torturing animals
“success”) with rats and mice.
Another development came when
Keller Breland, who studied under and later worked with Skinner, did an
experiment with a group of animals who weren’t locked inside Skinner
boxes. They were free to roam around a large, barn-like structure. He
conditioned them to learn a simple behavior (pushing a button) that
gained them a food reward. And most, if not all, of the animals quickly
learned to push the button whenever they were hungry.
After a
few days, though, a funny thing happened: the raccoons began “washing”
their hands, the chickens began pecking at the floor, and the pigs
began rooting around in the dirt. They all stopped producing the
conditioned behavior in favor of their own food-related, fixed-action
patterns, even though those behaviors weren’t rewarded. The real kicker
is that the experiment with the pigs had to be stopped or they would
have starved to death! As a result Breland said, “There are definite
weaknesses in the philosophy underlying these techniques,” and
suggested that animal trainers be on the lookout for what he called
“instinctive drift.” (“The Misbehavior of Organisms,” American Psychologist, 1961.)
If we apply this lesson to philosophers and flatworms, or ducks and dentists, we can see that McConnell’s idea really is off.
Different species have different evolutionary histories, different
morphologies, different developmental processes, different
environmental stressors, and thus different, fairly predictable,
predispositions to certain types of behavior.
So no, they don’t all learn the same way.
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