The Negative Effects of Positive Reinforcement

Here's another article originally posted at my PsychologyToday blog: 

The Negative Effects of Positive Reinforcement

In the first article in this series, Why Behavioral Science Is Losing the Training Wars, I described two examples of learning in dogs that can't be explained through either the pack leader model of training or learning theory, and suggested that the reason the positive training movement hasn't dominated the current training landscape is that behavioral science isn't as scientific as positive (or +R) trainers claim.

In the second, Is Behavioral Science Failing Our Dogs, I described how my two examples can only be explained completely and satisfactorily through a simple energy theory which operates primarily on the principle that all behaviors, instinctive or learned, are designed to reduce a dog's internal tension or stress:

stimulus (energy-in) > increased tension > behavior (energy-out) > release

It's all pure energy.

This idea may seem strange at first, but after all, the universe started out as energy. It then differentiated into subatomic particles, then into atoms of hydrogen, then helium, and up the periodic table. At a certain point some atoms were joined, energetically, into various kinds of molecules. At a point beyond that some of these molecules developed into living organisms, which then evolved and developed into the rich complexity of nature we see all around us (and inside of us) today. From the Big Bang to the dog run, energy continues to manifest itself in everything your dog does, from the way the neurons fire inside his brain to the way his tail wags when you come home from work.

In presenting his energy theory, former police dog trainer and natural philosopher Kevin Behan, writes: "The irreducible essence of anything is always a function of energy. I'm proposing that the nature of dogs is also a function of an energetic makeup rather than a [mental or] psychological one." (Read more here.)

My good friend Alexandra Semyonova -- a highly-respected and well-known dog trainer in the Netherlands, who uses only positive reinforcement techniques -- wrote to me not long ago, saying, "Your energy theory¹ is not as far-fetched as people may think. It's just that you have to think interdisciplinarily to get it. You could say that an energy exchange with the environment doesn't only take place through food. As two dogs look at each other [or play together], the electrical patterns in their brains change. This can trigger changes in physical structure. And because those brains are a sort of solidified past, those dogs will be responsive to [the] kind of energy related to that past, and not to some other kind of energy that wasn't present or important at the time²."

To me, that's brilliant. And it's exactly how operant conditioning works (when it does work). The reinforcement for "good" behaviors isn't the result of an external object, event, or marker; it's due to the way a dog's emotional energy flows and finds a satisfying release. The more satisfying the release, the more deeply the behavior it's coupled with is learned³.

Mind you, when I talk about energy I'm not being vague and new-agey. I'm talking about nervous or emotional energy. Nervous energy is essentially electric: the movement of electrons through one neuron into the next. It's choppy; it has an unpleasant stop/start feel. Plus it's hard to control; it operates on its own, almost forcing an animal to obey its (the energy's) own needs. True, nervous energy is necessary for an animal's survival, but it has nothing to do with animal happiness. That's a problem, because both dominance training and operant conditioning rely primarily on survival feelings to get their effects: with a dominance-trained dog it's the need to avoid danger (i.e., a correction), with a positively-reinforced dog it's the need for food (remember, behavioral science got its start with Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell, and continued with Skinner's rats pressing levers to obtain food pellets).

Emotional energy, though, is magnetic, flowing, and can be very pleasant. Yes, a dog may occasionally feel stressed if he has more emotional energy than his system can carry, especially if he has no way to resolve or release it. But at least he has more control over what he can do with it. And as long as he has that feeling, he's not distressed or thrown completely off-balance by the weight of excess emotion.

So it seems to me that despite Skinner's brilliance, instinctive biological needs actually interfere with an animal's capacity to learn, while positive emotions are the bedrock of learning. Behavior modification via survival needs is also almost wholly dependent on repetition and artificial reinforcement, not to mention the process of occasionally withholding rewards through a variable reinforcement ratio, which can be very stressful for a dog. Karen Pryor, one of the key figures of the positive training movement, writes in a 2006 article: "Reinforcement may go from predictable to a little unpredictable back to predictable, as you climb, step by step, toward your ultimate goal. Sometimes a novice animal may find this [variability] very disconcerting. If two or three expected reinforcers fail to materialize, the animal may simply give up and quit on you. You can see this clearly on the video of my fish learning to swim through a hoop. When three tries ‘didn't work' the fish not only quit trying, he had an emotional collapse, lying on the bottom of the tank in visible distress⁴."

Not only is this kind of training not positive, it actually proves that all behavior is learned, not through reinforcers, but through the reduction of internal tension or stress. The more stressed a dog is -- as with a variable ratio of reinforcement -- the deeper a behavior is learned when that stress is resolved. But learning through flow is anything but stressful. It also doesn't require reinforcements because it's an immensely pleasurable experience on its own. Plus it takes place instantly and automatically.

So no matter how well-conditioned our dogs become, no matter how much a part of their brain "salivates" at the sound of a clicker⁵, or works to gain a reward, on a certain level dogs are not very happy when they're subjected to learning through operant conditioning.

Not happy? Are you serious?

Deadly serious. I mean, think about it. Somewhere in the back of every dog trainer's mind is that image of Pavlov's dogs, salivating at the sound of a bell ringing. That's the apex of conditioning. Yet no one seems to consider how unhappy those dogs must have been. And let's not even get into the stress Skinner's lab rats and pigeons were feeling. So, yes, on a certain level, positive reinforcement is actually an unpleasant experience.

I know that may sound crazy, but the current trend in child-rearing and education tells us that positive reinforcement is undermining learning and happiness in our kids. In her Psychology Today blog, Creating in Flow, social psychologist Susan K. Perry quotes Teresa Amabile of Harvard. "If rewards become prominent in children's minds, they may overwhelm the intrinsic joy of doing something interesting and personally challenging." Kids who are given rewards for reading, for example, tend to choose shorter books in order to get more rewards, while children who are motivated by a love of learning will read anything that catches their fancy, just for the pure joy of it.

Every positive trainer reading this will assert that they see that kind of joy in their dog's eyes when their clients' dogs are learning through +R. I can only say that they must be seeing things differently than I do⁵. I would also argue that whatever happiness dogs do experience in a clicker class or by working for variable-ratio food rewards, it isn't because of the technique, it's probably because -- just like young children -- dogs are so hungry for learning and are designed to latch onto anything that gives them something to do with their energy -- especially in a social context -- that they're supplying their own emotional flow in order to help them move past the unpleasant aspects of conditioning techniques.

There's no doubt that there has to be a payoff for learning. That's the one simple truth of Skinner's theory. But if the payoff doesn't reduce internal tension, or spark feelings of pure joy, it will automatically create unhappiness and resistance in dogs just as it creates uncertainty and resentment in children.

The positive training movement defined itself from the outset as being a kinder and more scientific alternative to dominance training. And that's true. But dogs aren't lab rats. And there's a "new kid" in town, a method that's even kinder and may be more scientific.

If you've read my first article you'd know that my primary reason for discussing the holes I see in behavioral science is that dogs are trying to tell us something about the nature of consciousness. Lab rats and helper monkeys don't have the emotional capacity dogs do, so using survival feelings to condition them works fine most of the time. But dogs are different. Only canines, homo sapiens (and some cetaceans) have the ability to override instinct in favor of emotion. That's an amazing thing. And it's part of what makes dogs the current "it" species for cognitive scientists⁷.

We all love our dogs and we all want what's best for them. So I would challenge anyone reading this: if you believe operant conditioning is scientific, then be scientific and test Kevin Behan's energy theory for yourself. Next time I'll give you one simple exercise that will not only enable you to do that, it might just improve the lives of every dog you know.

LCK

Footnotes:

1) It's not my energy theory, though for some reason Semyonova likes to think it is. As this article states, it was developed by Kevin Behan. Oddly enough though, Semyonova and I are the first two people to describe canine social structure as part of a self-emergent system, long before we had a meeting of the minds online. Semyonova did it 2002 in her longitudinal study found at www.nonlineardogs.com, while I did it as a bit of passing dialogue in my first novel, A Nose for Murder, also published in 2002. Meanwhile, Kevin Behan described pack social structure -- particularly while hunting -- as a bottom-up, self-emergent system in his 1992 book, Natural Dog Training, even though he hadn't heard of emergence theory at the time: "Since each individual has different sensitivity to prey making, we observe the emergence of order -- the creation of a group and a pack -- out of what was chaos."

2) It's a physiological fact that certain sensory details associated with past emotional experiences can not only bring memories flooding back, they can often make you feel as if you're actually re-living that past event. One of the strongest of these mnemonic triggers comes through the sense of smell. For example, when your present-day nostrils inhale the same perfume worn by that wonderful girl you were in love with back in college, your olfactory nerves and the part of your hippocampus holding memories of her vibrate at the same frequency once again.

From Discover Magazine: "Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell ... says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. Then, as now, the prevailing notion was that the sensation of different smells is triggered when molecules called odorants fit into receptors in our nostrils like three-dimensional puzzle pieces snapping into place. The glitch here, for Turin, was that molecules with similar shapes do not necessarily smell anything like one another. Pinanethiol [C10H18S] has a strong grapefruit odor, for instance, while its near-twin pinanol [C10H18O] smells of pine needles. Smell must be triggered, [Turin] concluded, by some criteria other than an odorant's shape alone.

"What is really happening, Turin posited, is that the approximately 350 types of human smell receptors perform an act of quantum tunneling when a new odorant enters the nostril and reaches the olfactory nerve. After the odorant attaches to one of the nerve's receptors, electrons from that receptor tunnel through the odorant, jiggling it back and forth. In this view, the odorant's unique pattern of vibration is what makes a rose smell rosy and a wet dog smell wet-doggy. It is the frequency of vibration, not the shape, that determines the scent of a molecule."

So Alexandra Semyonova's statement -- "dogs will be responsive to [the] kind of energy related to that past, and not to some other kind of energy that wasn't present or important at the time" -- is right on target.

3) While it's true that learning still takes place in relation to a dog's history (as behavioral scientists tell us), the key element isn't a conscious mental process such as thinking of past experiences and figuring out how to apply them to the present moment, or of learning through consequences or trial-and-error (which would all require that the dog be able to engage in mental time travel and/or propositional thinking). It's simply about the dog vibrating at the same frequency in the here-and-now moment as he did in the past: in other words, learning is a funciton of energy, not a mental thought process.

4) Pryor goes on to say, "Casinos, believe me, use the power of the variable ratio schedule to develop behaviors, such as playing slot machines, that are very resistant to extinction, despite highly variable and unpredictable reinforcement."

So are we training dogs or creating gambling addicts?

5) Clicker training was invented by Keller Breland -- a student and later a colleague of B.F. Skinner -- as a way of marking behaviors while working with hunting dogs at a distance. Breland later taught Karen Pryor how to use clicks and whistles to train dolphins. Here's how Pryor describes the process:

"The trainer clicks at the moment the behavior occurs: the horse raises its hoof, the trainer clicks simultaneously. The dog sits, the trainer clicks. Clicking is like taking a picture of the behavior the trainer wishes to reinforce. After ‘taking the picture,' the trainer gives the animal something it likes, usually a small piece of food. Very soon (sometimes within two or three clicks), an animal will associate the sound of the click with something it likes: the reward. Since it wishes to repeat that pleasurable experience, it will repeat the action it was doing when it heard the click."

So again we're using Pavlov's dogs as a template.

6) Another figurehead of the positive training movement, Jean Donaldson, clicker trained her dog to hump her leg on cue. (I know!) In my experience dogs only exhibit that behavior when they're in a state of frustration, not joy. Yet Donaldson insists that her dog "seems to have fun" doing it. Plus it makes her (Donaldson) laugh. (For the full article, click here.)

Finally (on this point), the fact that +R trainers see joy in the dogs they train doesn't mean much; after all, I'm sure Cesar Millan -- the nemesis of the positive training movement -- sees joy in the eyes of the dogs he works with too.

7) Virginia Morrell writes in Science Magazine: "Dogs are fast becoming the it animal for evolutionary cognition research. Our canine pals, researchers say, are excellent subjects for studying the building blocks underlying mental abilities, particularly those involving social cognition. Their special relationship with humans is also seen as worthy of study in its own right; some researchers see Canis familiaris as a case of convergent evolution with humans because we share some similar behavioral traits. ... Some researchers even think that dogs may teach us more about the evolution ... of our social mind than can our closest kin, the chimpanzee, because Fido is so adept at reading and responding to human communication cues."

Captive & Laboratory Learning vs. The Natural Way

Here's a comment on my latest Psychology Today blog article, along with my reply. If you haven't already read the article you may still be able to follow most of the arguments put forth here.

Laboratory Learning vs. The Natural Way

Comment Submitted by Anonymous on November 6, 2009 - 7:16pm

I really don't feel there is a firm grasp of operant (behavioral) conditioning concepts in place here. Getting your dog to stop picking up trash off the ground by praising him is putting that behavior on stimulus control. This is widely used to eliminate unwanted behaviors-you don't ask for it, you don't get it. And I don't think you can call trying something with a few dogs a "theory." That is an insult to the scientific method, quite frankly.

I appreciate dog owners doing their best to be better owners to their dogs, operant conditioning is ALWAYS at play in every interaction you have with not only every dog, but every human you come into contact with. Behavior is constantly being reinforced or punished.

Operant conditioning is NOT simply positive reinforcement, and anyone who makes that claim (which I will admit has become fairly common) does not understand operant conditioning.

Read Skinner, read the Brelands, read Karen Pryor!!

Operant conditioning is postive and negative reinforcement (both which INCREASE behavior), and positive and negative punishment (designed to DECREASE behavior).

These methods are used to train animals of literally nearly every species in captivity from elephants to whales to sharks to turtles to fish to alligators to cats to rabbits to frogs to fish (zoos and aquariums aquire all KINDS of behavior with it), so please do not disregard something proven to be so universally successful as something that may not really work for dogs. I love dogs, but I am sorry to say they are not any more special or unique than any other animal. Don't "dogthropomorphize" behavior when it is simply behavior that is yes, specifc to dogs, but not so unique that the wheel must be reinvented to accomodate it.

Answer, submitted by Lee Charles Kelley on November 7, 2009 - 7:41am

Hi,

I don't think you have a firm grasp of what I've written.

1) How was the scavenging behavior put under stimulus control? The general principle for stimulus control is something I'm very familiar with. I use it all the time to teach dogs not to jump up or bark by first teaching them to jump up or bark on command, then teaching them what “Okay, off,” or "Quiet..." means.

Explain how that applies here.

2) I never said that the use of praise to stop a dog from scavenging was the basis of any theory. If you had read my articles more carefully you'd see that this behavioral shift was only presented as an example of learning that can't be explained through the alpha theory or learning theory.

3) The idea that operant conditioning is always at play in every interaction someone has with any animal or human is a myth. Not even a die-hard behaviorist would argue that. (They'd say you're ignoring instances where classical conditioning is at play.) Meanwhile, I would argue (and have) that neither form of conditioning can explain all types of behavior or learning in animals and humans. How does a child learn impulse control by pretending to be a factory guard? Is that operant conditioning? How does operant conditioning explain the scavenging example? Like everyone else, you've only attached a label to the phenomenon, you haven't explained it.

4) As for your reading list, I've read Skinner. Lots of Skinner. I've also read the Brelands. And sad to say, I went through my own Karen Pryor phase, where I thought operant conditioning was the "one true answer." But the more I applied oc principles to dogs the more I realized that the emperor has no clothes. Perhaps you should read Dennett and Chomsky and Pinsky and John Staddon and Gary Cziko.

5) I understand full well the difference between positive and negative reinforcement. I was explaining my approach to dog training yesterday in Riverside Park to a woman who's been training dogs for 6 years using clickers and positive reinforcement. We were discussing the praise issue mentioned here. She seemed to think that whether you're praising a dog or shouting at him you can still be reinforcing the behavior.

"Though shouting," she said, "would be negative, not positive, reinforcement."

"Actually," I said, "if shouting increased the behavior it would still be considered a positive reinforcement."

She didn't understand; she thought I was making it up.

6) The fact that these methods are used to train captive animals means very little. When we base our understanding of learning on the behaviors of animals in captivity we're only seeing a small, unnatural piece of the pie (which is, unfortunately how Skinner’s theory was first developed, in the lab, with animals kept captive in boxes, not walking around in real life). Captive wolves exhibit hierarchical behaviors, wild wolves don't. Why is that? When captive dolphins, who are designed by nature to swim hundreds of miles a day through open waters, are held prisoner in small (to them) tanks, why wouldn't they be willing to perform all sorts of acrobatics for food, or even for praise? What else are they supposed to do with their energy? Could they be trained to do all those things out in the open ocean? No, because in their natural environment they'd have another outlet for their energy.

7) Finally, you're completely misinterpreting my argument for dogthromorphism. I never said we should dogthropomorphize behaviors, but that instead of anthropomorphizing dogs, we should dogthropomorphize ourselves, meaning we should try to see their behavior from their own unique perspective. It may be true that all animals learn the same way, but that way isn't through operant conditioning; it's through the way emotional energy either flows or gets blocked. The satisfying release of emotion is what reinforces behavior and creates learning. Sometimes operant conditioning imitates that process, sometimes it doesn't. Dogs are the clearest window we have into this phenomenon.

LCK

"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"

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Some Myths About Behaviorism

I've been revamping my website, and in the course of upgrading one of the articles in my list of the Top Ten Myths about dogs, I came up with some interesting, and I think, valid criticisms of one of the current trends in dog training.

Some Myths About Behaviorism

Dog trainer and behavioral expert Patricia McConnell wrote in Bark Magazine not too 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."

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 that's true. But the implication 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 giving a dog rewards for good behavior.

What's wrong with using rewards?

Nothing. But for most behavioral science-oriented trainers that usually means food, partially because the foundation of behavioral science is built almost exclusively on the behaviors of albino rats locked inside Skinner boxes, and partially because it's usually the easiest and quickest way to get a dog's attention. As for those rats, their only motivation for learning to press a lever was supposedly to get a food pellet. But dogs aren't rats. Plus we don't normally train them inside boxes in a research lab.

"Yes," positive trainers would argue, "But whether the incentive in dog training is a treat or being given a ball to chase, it still boils down to one thing: positive reinforcement."

I agree. But as soon as we get locked-in to the idea that the linear, cut-and-dried precepts of behavioral science can show us all the answers, we don't keep our minds open to other possibilities. And far too many trainers these days consider food to be a universal reward. And that tiny little flaw in thinking keeps some dogs from ever being fully trained. If you're a dog owner who's been to a +R trainer and you tried to follow the protocols they gave you but found they didn't work, what was the first thing they said in reply? Probably: "Up the value of your treats!" (I had a client who complained, "What am I supposed to do, slaughter a cow and take the carcass with me on our walks?")

It's also instructive to understand that behavioral science techniques are notoriously ineffective when it comes to curing serious behavioral problems. The best proof of this is The Dog Who Loved too Much by Nicholas Dodman, even though Dodman didn't consciously write the book as a critique of behavioral science but as a justification for using drugs. But if behavioral science techniques were really effective we wouldn't need drugs except where there's a definite physiological cause of the behavior.

It's also interesting that Patricia McConnell has a much better success rate in solving behavioral problems than Dodman does. Much better. I think there are probably two reasons for this: 1) McConnell genuinely loves dogs while Dodman reportedly doesn't even like them, and 2) McConnell's protocols for solving behavioral problems also include teaching obedience skills, Dodman's doesn't. (Since all obedience behaviors are based on the predatory motor patterns of wild wolves, and since the prey drive is the key organizing force behind all canine social behavior, it stands to reason that teaching obedience skills will have some positive effect on bringing a dog's emotions back into alignment with his owner's needs.)

Going back to Skinner, I think we need to consider that when he proposed his theories it was widely believed that animals didn't even have emotional lives. With some of the recent advances in neuroscience, and the discovery of the same emotional circuits that exist in both the non-human and human brain, we now know that animals can be very emotional. This is especially true of dogs. Yet the behavioral science approach is based almost exclusively on changing a dog's behavior with little thought given to the underlying emotional cause of that behavior.

Some in the field would disagree. They would say that they're very conscious of how emotions affect behavior. I have no doubt that that's true. But the techniques they use are still based on a clinical, unemotional, Skinnerian foundation, one that's simply not geared to change a dog's emotions as much as it is to change his behavior. That kind of thinking is built in to the system despite the fact that all behavior, learned or instinctive, is the end product of emotion. In fact without emotion there would be no such thing as positive reinforcement. This is not something that factored in to Skinner's equations at the time he made them. It should be factored in now, but from my observations that rarely happens.

Meanwhile in Natural Dog Training our focus is always on changing the dog's emotional state first because we know once we do that and bring the dog's emotions back into balance, the right behavior will always follow.

It was also believed during Skinner's time that the foundation of all animal behavior was geared specifically around the survival instinct, so when his rats pressed the lever and "learned" to make food appear, it made sense that their only impetus for doing so was based on their own survival: food is necessary for survival, therefore food is a primary reinforcer. But with the current trend in science to find and understand the roots of "biological altruism," the tendency in social animals (and even in some non-social species) to give up what's in one's own "self" interest in order to help another animal in need, the primacy of the survival instinct is starting to seem a bit mothworn if not badly outdated. Biological altruism is a huge puzzle because it implies that a very important aspect of Darwinism (and one that has a domino effect on behaviorism as well), may not, in fact, be what it seems.

Strangely enough, the clearest window into this puzzle (or perhaps not so strangely) is the domesticated dog. No species is more famous for its ability, let alone its outright unstoppable zeal for putting its own survival on the line in order to help those it loves. In the past few months alone (I'm writing this in July of 2009), there have been two videotaped incidents of dogs dashing into traffic in order to rescue a fallen comrade, one was on a freeway in Chile and other on the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx.

This brings up another point about the difference between Pavlov's and Skinner's era and ours (i.e., the early 20th Century v. the early 21st Century). Back in Skinner's day it was believed that all animals were vying for dominance within their own habitats as well as within their own social groups. And just like the beliefs about the survival instinct which accompanied and most probably engendered this Darwinian idea, the underlying principle was that animals always put their own "self" interest above all else. And that's simply not true. It's especially not true in dogs, and it turns out that it's not even true in wolves. And yet every single dog trainer who espouses behavioral science as the bedrock of all animal learning is still operating under this false premise. They don't accept the fact that sometimes the survival instinct simply isn't operational, which means that sometimes a primary reinforcer is not only not primary it's not a reinforcer. And yet we're told time and again: "Up the value of your treats!" (I'm not saying that Darwin's theory is wrong, or that evolution isn't a real process, or that treats aren't valuable in dog training, nor am I saying that the survival instinct isn't an important part of the evolutionary process, just that it's not as important as we once thought it was, which again has a domino effect on Skinner's theories about behavior.)

One of the clearest examples we see of a dog's ability to routinely override its own survival instinct is in dogs who do search-and-rescue work. With the recent explosion of interest in behavioral science some search-and- rescue dogs have been trained exclusively with food and clickers. There was great hope in certain quarters that this would be the dawn of a new age of perfectly conditioned working dogs. But in the end most of these dogs have proven unreliable, especially when forced to work for long hours, because they’ll often indicate a false positive just to get a treat.

"Dogs want rewards," says Dr. Lawrence J. Myers, of Auburn University's College of Veterinary Medicine, "So they will give false alerts to get them."

Giving a false alert is something a dog trained through his prey drive would never do; he wouldn't know how. He'll work for hours and won't quit until he finds exactly what he's looking for. Why? Because he's focused on hunting, not on getting an external reward. The only problem they had with the search-and-rescue dogs at Ground Zero was making them stop to rest. Those amazing animals would have kept working until they found a survivor or a body or just dropped dead themselves. Is that courage? Is that altruism? Or is that just the way dogs are?

Kevin Behan made a very insightful comment on his blog recently. (If you don't know this, Kevin spent a major portion of his career training police dogs and detection dogs, using their prey drive - not food rewards - as the focal point of learning.)

"Search-and-rescue dogs can search disaster sites whereas no other animal can be conditioned to do so, which is especially revealing since cats and monkeys are far better adapted, physically speaking, for such work. One can acclimate a police dog to love running up a metal fire escape with someone throwing metal pots and pans down at it. All these so-called negatives ... arouse [the dog's] prey-making urge to an even greater pitch."

Can you imagine what those pots and pans would do to cats and monkeys? Is it even remotely possible that they could be trained to run up a fire escape while you're throwing loud, clattering objects at them? Even if they did make it to the top, my bet is that their first priority after getting there would be to find a safe place to hide and not come out for days.

Monkeys clearly have more mental agility than dogs. And to a large extent, so do cats. And Kevin's insight is, as usual, dead-on; both species are also more physically agile when put in the kinds of situations that most search-and-rescue dogs find themselves in. So if learning is only about reinforcing the behaviors you want from an animal, and monkeys and cats are smarter and more physically capable of working in and around disaster sites, why can't they be conditioned to do it?

Because they don't want to. Dogs, on the other hand, live for this kind of stuff. Talk about treats, they eat this stuff up. When dogs are trained properly, through their prey drive, they're absolutely driven to find survivors at a disaster site, or to sit and stay and come when called, or to do whatever else you want them to. They'll do it: no questions asked, no treats expected. You can't condition that kind of willingness into a cat or monkey just as you can't condition it out of a dog.

If we apply this lesson to flatworms and philosophy professors we can see that Patricia McConnell's idea really is off, particularly since she's a dog trainer herself, and particularly since the quote in question came from a piece she wrote for a magazine devoted exclusively to canines.

Again, I'm not saying that conditioning isn't a valid form of learning. It is. It has its place; there's no question about that. But in some cases, at least where dogs are concerned, there may be a much better alternative. You simply have to open your mind a little to see it.

And no, all animals don't learn the same way. Dogs are different. And it's their very difference that can help us see some of the cracks in the foundations of behavioral science.  

LCK

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The Importance of Play

Here's a little article on the importance of play!

The Benefits of Free Play

About twenty years ago, before I studied to become a dog trainer, I got my first dog as an adult. He was a black-and-white English field setter named Charley. I was surprised and delighted at some of the things dogs learned from one another while they were playing. And they often seemed to learn in a way that didn’t exactly fit with what I knew from my basic college psych courses of B.F. Skinner’s views on learning. One experience in particular stuck with me:

I was with a group of dog owners, hanging out with our dogs in Central Park one summer morning, when a new dog showed up. I don't remember his name, so let’s call him Spike. After the preliminaries were over (sniffing, play bowing, and the like), Spike got my dog, Charley, to start chasing him. And in the course of their game, Spike did a maneuver where he faked left and went right, which totally fooled Charley, causing him to go left and run into a tree. He yelped in pain, and I was worried that he might’ve really hurt himself. But before I could run over to check on his condition, he stood back up, shook himself off, and ran after Spike again, chasing him even harder than he had been before. 

Huh, I thought. That was a very negative experience for Charley, and yet, I supposed, because perhaps his adrenalin and endorphins were set at a pretty high level during the chase, it only made him want to play even harder, not give up and go home.

Then, during the next “lap,” another strange thing happened: Spike tried the same fake-out maneuver but this time Charley wasn't fooled. He stayed right on Spike's tail. I had always thought that learning required trial and error and repetition, but here Charley had learned Spike's “strategy” through just one experience. Still, as I watched them continue to circle around I thought, “Well, it certainly was a singular experience for Charley. Maybe that’s all he needed.” But then another strange thing happened, this time Spike faked right and went left and Charley still stayed on his tail. So Spike tried another maneuver, he faked left and went left. Yet Charley stayed on his tail.

Looking back on it now I realize that there must’ve been something Charley saw during that first fake which registered in some part of his brain; there was some ineffable change in Spike's kinetic energy or motion that “signified” or signaled fake as opposed to real, though Charley didn’t recognize its significance until he almost hit that tree and then landed on his butt.

They played like this for a while, and then Spike and his owner left, and a little while later Charley began playing with another dog. (And here's where it gets really good.) During a chase with this new dog, Charley incorporated the fake-left-go-right maneuver he'd just learned from Spike. Only here the roles were reversed: Charley was now doing the fake maneuver. He’d never done it before that day, yet he effortlessly incorporated it into his play repertoire, including, on subsequent laps, all of Spike’s variations. In other words he’d seemingly generalized everything there was to know about that play-fake maneuver in just one, head-over-tail experience. It was instant learning.

That's when I realized that there was something about the physical and emotional dynamics of play that increases a dog's ability to process information, that decreases the amount of time it takes him to learn something new (decreases it to almost zero, in fact), and which increases his ability to remember a new skill to the point that he’s able to immediately make it a part of his own behavioral vocabulary. How does this happen?

I’m still not sure. But it seems to work on many different levels at once, which makes it distinctly different from other training methods. My sense of how and why it works better than free shaping or force training, is that for dogs rough-and-tumble play involves instincts and emotions which simply require a great deal of attention to detail, not to mention a great deal of attention to a lot of details all at once (a gestalt, if you will). Because of this, free play probably creates more dendritic connections inside the brain in one single burst of learning than free-shaping or force-based training does over a period of weeks or even months. In other words, free-shaping creates connections one branch at a time, force-based training creates similar connections, but since they’re based on fear a lot of unwanted, survival-based connections get made at the same time. But play-based learning seems to create whole dendritic trees, and maybe even whole forests, in a single burst of joy and excitement.

Do I know, scientifically, that that’s the case? No. But there's starting to be some scientific evidence about this. Social play in rats, for example, activates certain brain growth factors such as BDNF (or brain-derived neurotrophic factor). These growth factors stimulate neurons and synapses for a) more growth, b) more differentiation, and c) better long-term survival, particularly in the hippocampus, cortex, and basal forebrain—areas that are all directly related to learning and memory. (Gordon, et al., 2003).

Nearly 2500 years ago Plato extolled the benefits of free play: “those natural modes of amusement which children find out for themselves when they meet.” And in The Republic he wrote “Our children from their earliest years must take part in all the more lawful forms of play, for if they are not surrounded by such an atmosphere they can never grow up to be well conducted and virtuous citizens.”

The same is true today, for both children and dogs. Free play—where the puppy decides on its own how it wants to interact playfully with another puppy or adult dog—is also a vitally important part of that puppy’s emotional, social, physical, and even his neurological development. Evidence also shows that outdoor play is much better for dogs, on many different levels, than indoor play.

One of the most intriguing benefits of free play is that it facilitates maturation of frontal lobe inhibitory skills that regulate and inhibit impulsive urges (Panksepp, et al., 2003). In other words, the more our dogs play as pups, the more impulse control they’ll exhibit as adults. It’s also known that dogs who’ve had fewer opportunities for free play as pups are more likely to exhibit aggressive behaviors as adult dogs. And this isn’t just due to lack of socialization, it’s that play is vitally important for healthy, lasting growth of the neural connections between the aggression centers in the brain, like the amygdalla, and the impulse control center in the frontal lobes (Potegal &; Einon, 1989). Play has many benefits in developing animals (van den Berg, et al. 1999). And “since the urge to play is a neurological drive — an insistent emotional motivation — ludic tendencies become excessive in play-starved animals.” (Panksepp, et al., 1984)

So that’s some of the growing scientific perspective on the need for play. And from my perspective, as a dog trainer of fifteen years (using a play-based model of training), play is also one of the best tools for teaching a dog to learn and obey. I also use a form of play therapy to cure severe behavioral problems in dogs.

Some scientists are now looking into a theory of how free play among pre-school children might prevent some cases of ADHD, and perhaps reverse others. The fact is, there’s been a huge swing away from allowing our children to engage in free, unstructured play, particularly outdoors. Many children are being put into pre-school (or pre-pre-school) before they can walk! Kids are signed up for structured kiddie play groups at very young ages, where they’re not allowed to engage in free play so much as they’re expected to learn things, even pushed into learning.

What’s wrong with that? 

Jaak Panksepp (formerly an evolutionary psychiatrist and neurochemist, and now a veterinarian!), is the author of one study on play. In it he says that when we allow pre-schoolers to engage in free play, where they make up their own games and their own rules (under adult supervision), natural processes of learning impulse control, fairness, and controlling aggressive feelings take place naturally. The brain develops faster. New abilities to learn and move through space develop quicker. He also writes: 

“Our recent broad-scale brain gene expression analysis has indicated that activity of about a third of the 1,200 brain genes in frontal and posterior cortical regions are significantly modified by play within an hour of a 30 min. play session (Kroes, Burgdorf Panksepp and Moskal, 2006, Unpublished observations from Falk Center for Molecular Therapeutics, Northwestern University).” He adds, “If such dynamic brain changes evoked by play facilitate brain growth and maturation, perhaps solidifying pro-social circuits of the brain, we must worry about anything that diminishes the progression of such developmental processes.” 

To me this brings up an issue some dog trainers, like myself, are starting to have with puppy classes, and how we think in many cases such classes might be interfering with our puppies’ natural mechanisms for learning impulse control, and which may even stunt some forms of neurological development. Personally, I think getting a puppy to settle down, stop fooling around, and pay attention at a puppy class qualifies as something Panskepp talks about, that “diminishes the pro-social circuits of the brain,” not to mention brain development which is one of the natural, biological results of free play. It’s also why I think play itself is, generally speaking, a more valuable form of training for dogs than plodding through the process by reinforcing single behaviors, one at a time, or by forcing or scaring a dog into obeying.

Most obedience classes aren’t really designed for what’s most natural in terms of how young puppies are genetically designed to learn. New owners often expect their puppy to meet certain obedience criteria, and too many trainers are all too happy to teach puppies without considering whether the client’s wish-list is truly appropriate. In nearly every puppy class young pups are taught things like paying attention and sitting still, when biologically speaking, and I mean from purely neurological and physiological points of view (regarding proper development of both brain and body structure), a young puppy’s attention needs to wander continuously: he needs to watch how things move, he needs to sniff things, grab them with his teeth, investigate in his own puppylike way.

If you simply spend time looking at many of a puppy’s natural behaviors you’ll see that they exhibit some of the strangest, seemingly unrelated and illogical physical movements imaginable. Why? Because their bodies need to in order for their muscles and nervous systems to develop properly. In terms of learning, and for the development of motor skills, and even for the proper growth of his young brain, a pup needs to just plain move his little body around constantly in meaningless ways. And he needs to do that a whole lot more than he needs to be taught how to sit still in puppy class. So it seems to me that all too many trainers firmly (yet wrongly) believe they’re not interfering with the puppy’s natural development when they get that little guy to finally sit still and pay attention!

Should pups not be trained at all then? Of course they should. They need to be gently directed away from chewing things they shouldn’t and encouraged to chew things they should, for example. And there’s nothing wrong with teaching the puppy in your home, occasionally asking him to “sit” or encouraging a recall when he's bored and looking for something interesting to do. But that’s a whole lot different than taking him to the most distracting environment possible (a lot of other puppies and strange people) and then tugging at his attention and pulling him away from what his genes are telling him to do, which is to develop his curiosity, grow new neural pathways, and improve his motor skills! This is a time in a young animal's life where nature has decided that splitting is most needed, and puppy classes seem almost devoted to doing the exact opposite.

So rather than impose a curriculum on the dog from the outside in, I think it’s much better to let puppies develop at their own pace without overt external pressure. Yes, we should provide every opportunity for our puppies to learn and explore and become bold and confident, all of which happens best through playing with other pups and adult dogs, and comes not at all from being told to sit still, lie down on command, or walk nicely on a leash. If those things are to be taught at all (and they should be at some point), it’s best to wait until the puppy’s brain and emotions are more developed, which happens naturally and best through free play. And when you do teach a pup these things (preferably not until after 6 months), it’s best to teach them as part of an active, high-energy game, where the puppy gets to win by obeying. That’s because the more actively the older pup's whole organism is involved in the process—his emotions, his kinetic energy, his instincts, and his brain—the better and faster he'll learn.

Panksepp also makes the case that free play in young mammals is a basic, neurologic drive, as strong as any other natural drive there is. And quite often, at least in my experience, teaching a dog to use this drive to play in a natural, rough-and-tumble way, can cure some of the most severe behavioral problems we see in dogs, from aggression, to fear and panic-based disorders, to separation anxiety.

The reason this is so, is that in my view, behavioral problems arise, generally speaking, when a dog's natural energy isn’t being used properly. Whether the dog’s domestic origins are based on scavenging (and I don’t think they are, though that’s the current model) or hunting, it doesn’t matter. Dogs are predators at heart. (Why else would puppies “kill” their toys, using a modal action pattern that’s an exact homologue of one of a wolf’s predatory behaviors?)

The first wolf appeared millions of years ago. And long before that—before wolves were even wolves—they were members of the micadae family, who were also hunters. And their evolutionary history goes back another 40-60 million years. So it seems to me that a mere 12-120 thousand years of domestication hasn’t erased those 40 million+ years of predatory needs or tendencies in the evolution of the domesticated dog. As a result dogs have a neurological drive to hunt, just as all mammals have a neurological drive to play. But since most dogs don’t need to hunt in order to “make a living,” their main behavioral question (once they've got a stable social structure) is:

“What do I do with my predatory/aggressive energy?”

Almost all behavioral problems stem from this one question. By giving dogs an outlet for that neurologically based predatory energy through play, and by building that drive to the point that it becomes like an irresistible force (which is what nature intended it to be), the dog's instincts and energies are brought back into alignment with his environment, and behavioral problems (which are merely attempts by the dog to express that predatory energy in some seemingly unrelated way), disappear. For that dog, the question, “What do I do with my energy?” has been answered: you focus it on obedience through play.

That’s what I’ve learned in the past 15 years or so. But right now? I’ve got three dogs here (two puppies and one Trevor), tearing up my apartment (not literally) who need to go out to play...


LCK

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