Positive Reinforcement

south central schutzhund training

Taking A Closer Look at Positive Reinforcement

It’s no surprise that we all talk about and use positive reinforcement in our training to strengthen behaviors we like to make them more likely to reoccur. More and more trainers are moving towards Positive Reinforcement techniques in their training to create happier working dogs. The focus of this article is using positive reinforcement to help increase intensity, frequency, and duration of behaviors that we want to teach or maintain in our dogs.
First of all, when we talk about using positive reinforcement in training, it is important that the dog wants to acquire more of whatever we are using to motivate him. For example, if you are only using a piece of cheese to motivate a dog with weak food drive, you may need to up the motivator to something more interesting to the dog. Often times the handlers THINK the dog should like the reinforcement, when they could really care less about it. An example of this is patting the dog on the head for a job well done, while the dog is squinting his eyes and ducking his head, waiting for his handler to stop this crazy behavior!
Now that we have our reinforcement chosen we can begin training to make certain behaviors more intense, occur more frequently, or have a longer duration. If we look at increasing the intensity of a behavior, we need to reinforce at the precise moment the dog is displaying the most intensity. For example, there are many ways to reinforce intense behavior if you are trying to create a fast recall. One method is to have a helper hold the dog on a leash while the handler runs away. At the precise moment the dog pulls hardest against the leash, the helper lets go of the dog reinforcing the urgency/intensity to get to his handler. The next time you set up this equation, the dog will start to immediately pull hard into the leash to get to his handler due to his success the last time he tried that behavior. In my training I normally work on teaching intensity from the dog first, but this comes with its own set of problems, especially when you move into duration behaviors.
When you reinforce for duration of a specific behavior, the behavior must occur for a specific amount of time before it will be reinforced. In this example I will use the long down exercise. If we first teach the dog to intensely go into the down position for reinforcement, you will have some trouble keeping him in that position when training for duration. The dog thinks the act of immediately laying down qualifies him for his reinforcement; once the reinforcement is withheld for a time, the dog will have problems with the new set of rules. In learning theory, this is called upping the criteria of a behavior. You will now show the dog that not only does he have to do it quickly to qualify for reinforcement, but he must also maintain some duration before the reinforcement is available to him. In order to keep the behavior under duration, you will slowly shape the duration from one second to a gradually longer duration. In the long down exercise, this could be as long as twelve minutes. This way, you will be able to keep your intensity and duration of the down. Once the behavior is solid, you will need to reinforce intensity and duration intermittently to make sure that you keep both intensity and duration of the same behavior.
The last section of this equation is looking at frequency of a behavior. Here we will use the example of barking in the blind. At first our helpers want one good intense bark, then they reward with a grip. Next time the helper will wait for two barks then three then four and so on until we have good frequency of that behavior. Looking at this one “finished” exercise, we will ultimately go back and forth and reinforce intensity, frequency and duration of the bark and hold. If the dog is tired and we want him to bark a little more intensely, we either wait or help him achieve maximum intensity and immediately reinforce him for that behavior. If he is not barking with good frequency, then we must capture the picture of good frequency and reinforce that behavior. What if he is used to being reinforced for only six or eight barks? Then we will only reinforce him after ten to fifteen barks, and so on. As you can see, in just one exercise you can use positive reinforcement to increase the intensity, frequency, duration or a combination of all three.
In conclusion, we must look at all areas of positive reinforcement to see how it will benefit us in our training. In this article we focused on only three parts of reinforcement, not including schedules of reinforcement, shaping, chaining…Again, the point is to make you aware of how the power of positive reinforcement can help us in training. We are always using it in our training even if we are unaware of it. As a final parting comment, if all this scientific mumbo jumbo makes no sense, you can always refer to one principal that NEVER FAILS. “The only thing two dog trainers can agree on is what the third one is doing wrong!!” Until next time, happy training.

Last Modified January 11, 2006

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