Everything you are learning about in this mini course has to do with communication. That is what shaping is, its communicating to an animal via positive reinforcement and successive approximations what you want it to do. Our animals are constantly absorbing information from their environment and using that information to make decisions about what the best behavior to perform in the present moment is. We leverage this in our training by pairing our animals behavior with predefined cues that we can use to ask them to do a specific behavior. It’s our job to make this information as clear as possible by having well defined, distinct and clear cues. Below is an example of a technique we used to examine our cues and conseqeuntly improve our communication …
EXAMPLE
SIDE NOTE: When thinking about cues and what cues to use, it helps me to think about it from the animals perspective … what is a cue ? It’s a change in the animal’s environment … it’s new information that communicates to your animal … if you do this behavior now then your history tells you that there is a very high probability that reinforcement will follow.
It’s our job to make sure that the information/cues we provide are as clear and as easy to understand as we can possibly make them.
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