Criteria Shifts Beyond the Acqusition Phase
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[00:00:00] If you train, compete, or teach dog agility, you're in the right place. Hey there, I'm Megan Foster, creator of Fostering Excellence and Agility. Join me as I share key insights on all things related to dog agility and help find your team's path to excellence and unlock your best year yet. Let's get started.
Hello again. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're going to talk about shifting criteria beyond the acquisition phase. So how do we take a behavior from, they know the behavior start to finish, they have it on a cue, and it is fairly reliable in ideal situations, and [00:01:00] move it to the point where. We are confident in its sustainability for the competition ring.
When I'm thinking about shifting criteria and moving the needle of how well my dog understands a specific behavior, I am kind of thinking about three different categories. The first is just making the context a little bit different. The second is adding in intentional distractions. And the third is making intentional changes to the reinforcement delivery and schedule.
So let's first talk about making the situation different. One way we can do this is focusing on the handler's position and how fast the handler is moving. [00:02:00] For example, if you are working on your dog's contact obstacles. For every rep that you do, you can change the handler's proximity to the equipment or the dog, and you can also change how fast the handler is moving by making every rep a little bit different.
We are exposing the dog to situations in which they will likely have to deal with in competition. But doing so in a way where they are still at a very high success rate and we are building the confidence that they can complete the behavior regardless of where the handler is or how fast the handler is moving.
The second thing that we can intentionally change is the dogs. Position and how fast the dog is moving, right? So another great example is their weave pole training. We can change the [00:03:00] dog's approach line and how much speed they are coming toward the weave poles with at every single rep. So again, we are growing their database for how to complete that behavior.
The third way that we can change the context or situation that you're training in is by adding in neutral items to your training environment. So one extreme example of this would be, my friend and I decided early on in her puppies training that we weren't going to. Teach it the tunnel very first thing.
And so what this allowed us to do was teach it a lot of concepts that require the dog to ignore the tunnel. Before the dog knew what the tunnel was or had a high reinforcement history [00:04:00] for said tunnel. So this dog was able to learn how to layer the tunnel and keep a line near a tunnel with the tunnel as a distraction.
Before that dog fell in love with tunneling. And like I said, that's an extreme example because tunnels are easy for young dogs to learn and are a part of many. Foundation curriculums. So if you aren't making that decision, which is absolutely okay, you can still add neutral props or items to your training environment.
Just to introduce the concept that the environment will be changing and that doesn't have an impact on the behavior you are trying to train and maintain. So this can be furniture while not neutral because your dog probably knows about jumping on furniture, sleeping on furniture and things like that. There's not a huge reinforcement history in a [00:05:00] training context with your living room furniture.
Or maybe there's not. A training history, a reinforcement history with items from your kitchen. So just adding in some neutral things to the environment that your dog will notice, but won't be all that interested in can again, improve the ability for your dog to perform that behavior regardless of what's going on in the environment.
Next we're going to talk about layering in intentional distractions, and these are typically things that are not neutral to your dog. Uh, like people, other dogs noises and more intentional changes to the environment. But now we're focusing on things that your dog has. Feelings about and potentially has a reinforcement [00:06:00] history for like saying hi to people or saying hi to other dogs or being interested in what other dogs are doing, or being interested in what other people are doing.
Um, noises right. Dog shows are noisy, so we need to make sure that we are layering in different amounts of noise into our training. Just to make sure that the dog is not overwhelmed by one noise in particular, and then the same with changes to the environment. We do also want to start leaning in the direction of using changes that the dog does have a reinforcement history for.
Okay. When we're intentionally adding distractions, there are two variables that we need to pay close attention to. The first is intensity. So how bright is the distraction? How close is it? How is it behaving? Is it, you know, moving around a lot? Is it really noticeable? Uh, [00:07:00] or is it acting boring?
Um, how loud is it? The, these types of things. So how intense is the distraction? And then the second variable that we're paying attention to is the novelty of said distraction, because when. Novelty is high and we're not sure how the dog might react to the distraction. We want to try our best to turn the intensity level down so that the dog does not have an overreaction and that they are still able to perform the behavior that we're asking them to do.
However, when novelty is low, so you're working with a trusted, well-known friend as your distractor or one of your own dogs that your other dog is very comfortable with, you can increase the intensity to ridiculous levels. You can have your [00:08:00] good friend physically try to. Pull your dog away from you, with treats and calling their name, and you can take the intensity much farther than you actually need, but just to be able to get as much as you can out of the distractions that you do have access to.
So. If we're focusing on using the dials of intensity and novelty to create different distractions, we can get a lot of work out of distractions that we might feel like aren't that distracting to our dogs anymore. So it's not all about finding new friends or strangers or places in the wild to train.
It's just about balancing those levels of intensity and novelty to create different contexts for the training [00:09:00] situations that you're in. Okay. So then we can also lean on changes to the environment that are not neutral to the dog. So now we are talking about, you know, moving. Known obstacles, known props into the training sessions of specific obstacles so we can make sure that the tunnels are near the weave pole or the tunnel is under the contact obstacle.
We can bring jumps in closer to each other, right? So we want to make sure that we're not just training the obstacles and the behaviors. In the same kind of setups over and over again. We want that to be constantly changing and we want to expose the dog to a lot of different setups and contexts for each individual obstacle or jump [00:10:00] behavior.
The easy level is just making these known obstacles. Available. You're not asking for them. They are just in the environment and you are still singularly focused on the one behavior. And then over time, the expert level is being able to ask for both behaviors in the same session, alternating back and forth.
Because what happens when we. Bring something into the environment. We are lighting it up a little bit because we are making it available, but then when we ask the dog to interact with that other obstacle, we are increasing the intensity. So again, we're just focusing on balancing the novelty with the intensity to make sure that we're still setting the dog up for success.
And finally we're talking about making intentional changes [00:11:00] to reinforcement. And we can do this in a few ways. First, we can change the reward strategy. So if I was primarily rewarding something with food from my hand, I can change that to a toy for my hand. If my dog. Likes training for toys. I could also change this to food on the ground, either just available on the ground or in a dish, or in a food toy or in a robot, because changing the reward strategy or the reward type is going to impact the arousal level and is going to potentially impact the behavior itself.
So just being aware that I'm not rewarding every behavior in the exact same way. Every single time is a good way to make training sessions different and continue moving the needle of how well your dog knows a behavior. [00:12:00] The second way we can do this is move where the reinforcement is delivered.
Is it close to where the obstacle or behavior was completed, or is it farther away from where it was performed? I can choose to reward a jump behavior very close to the jump, very close to where the behavior was happening, or I can choose to reward it farther away from the jump and maybe closer to me after chasing me down.
This again is going to impact the arousal level and just changing where the reinforcer is placed or delivered. Is changing the cue context, which might, uh, challenge your dog in unique ways.
Another way we can change reinforcement. That unfortunately I think gets skipped often in agility, is taking it out of your hand, taking it out of your pocket, and taking it out of the training space altogether.
If you are [00:13:00] used to primarily training with the rewards in your hand, can you put them in your pocket and wait until the behavior is complete to mark, reach into your pocket and then deliver the reward. If that's going well, can you leave the reward on a table or chair close to the obstacle that you're training?
And same thing, wait until the behavior has been completed. Mark and then go to the table to collect the reward. And even more yet, can the rewards be left outside the training space and the dog move a significant distance away from the reward, complete the behavior, and then return outside the training space to collect the reward.
Again, these are just ways that we are continuing to test the sustainability of the behaviors and also the motivation behind the, the [00:14:00] behaviors that we're trying to train. And finally, another way to move the reinforcement and challenge the behaviors is to start. Sequencing some of these behaviors together and we can start very small.
So even if your dog has just learned to take a single jump on verbal cue, you can add a spin and that spin can be lured. It doesn't even have to be a trained spin on verbal cue. You can physically prompt a spin. Verbally cue the jump and then reinforce the jump, so that way we're introducing the concept at any point in the training that it won't always be a behavior cookie, behavior cookie behavior cookie experience.
Sometimes we have to do multiple behaviors before the rewards at the end. So focusing on changing up how and [00:15:00] when you reinforce. Is just one more way we can increase the fluency of our dog's behaviors. My biggest takeaway here is that you can make every training session a little bit different if we focus on making things different, but not necessarily harder.
We're more likely to expose our dogs to a wider variety of contexts while still maintaining a high level of success.
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, I really appreciate some feedback. You can leave me a review, engage on social media or share this with a friend. I hope you'll be back to listen to my next episode. In the meantime, you can find all of my offers on my website, fx agility.com. Happy [00:16:00] training.
