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How Does It Work |
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An unprepossessing instrument, the clicker is a small,
hand-held device with a metal strip you depress with
your thumb, to achieve a sharp, loud click. And I do
stress "loud". Don't click it too near your dog's ears,
or you may have just ruined your dog for clicker
training altogether.
How to start:
Load your pockets or a small container full of tiny
pieces of cheese or meat (for rewards). Try a few
experimental clicks around your dog, to be sure it
doesn't frighten him. Once you have his attention
though, it's time to start.
You want him to associate the sound of the clicker with
a reward. Click the clicker, and give him a piece of the
chosen reward (cheese or meat). Do this about ten times;
click and treat. After the tenth time, click again, but
withhold the treat. Does he look for a treat? If so, go
ahead and give him a treat, and click and treat again to
reinforce it. Throughout the day, click and check his
response. If he comes running to you looking for a
treat, he's made the right connection.
How it Works:
The primary use of the clicker is to "mark" behaviours.
Instead of yelling "Good boy!" or some other positive
word, you press the clicker, which is a much faster
reinforcement, and tends to eliminate mistakes of
timing. Once the behaviour has been "marked" by a click,
following up with a treat is less time sensitive, since
the dog already knows he did the correct thing.
Operant conditioning is the way any animal (including
the human kind) interacts with and learns from its
environment. Simply put, an animal tends to repeat an
action that has a positive consequence and tends not to
repeat one that has a negative consequence. Trainers can
take advantage of that natural tendency by providing
positive reinforcement following an action that they
want the animal to repeat. In order for the animal to
connect the positive reinforcement to the behavior that
he is doing, the reinforcement must happen AS the
behavior is occurring, not afterwards. The actual
reinforcement can't always be gotten to the animal at
that precise instant, however.
Trainers needed to find another way of letting the
animal know that he was doing the right thing, so they
began using a conditioned reinforcer. A conditioned
reinforcer is anything that wouldn't ordinarily be
something the animal would work to get. A primary
reinforcer, on the other hand, is something that the
animal automatically finds reinforcing, such as food or
water. When a conditioned reinforcer is paired with a
primary reinforcer, they become of equal importance to
the animal. Enter the clicker as a conditioned
reinforcer.
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