E81: 한나 브래니건(Hannah Branigan) - 행동 체인 & 컴피티션

So for example, we're doing, I do want to do sports with him. And so we play a lot of kind of motivational games, drive-building games, where he's moving and I'm moving and there's a lot of excitement and a lot of arousal. At the same time, as I'm playing those games in a training context, I am juxtaposing them with less exciting, less arousing, more relaxing, more thinky sorts of games. So we might play with his ball for a few minutes and work on some toy skills. And then immediately in the same session, we'll go to some mat and shape relax on a mat with some food. And then we might go back to working on some toy skills and then go back to relax on a mat. And that switching between food and toys and again, being able to balance that is something that I'm focusing on a lot in terms of his reinforcement and then also just in terms of like all of the behaviors that we're working on. I've been doing quite a bit of thinking lately just about how much every dog is really kind of unique and they're their own individuals. And that that means that any new dog is going to be totally different than any dog any of us has owned or trained kind of before that one. So how do you kind of go about getting to know a new dog or puppy for that matter? Like, what do you want to know about them? I'm not doing anything particularly formal in that way. We mostly just kind of go through life. And as we come across something like, like, you know, a cat or an unfamiliar person or whatever, you know, we'll, I'll pause and I'll observe his response. And maybe it's like, oh, that's not a big deal or there's, there's the behaviors that I see in this context are totally fine, appropriate. Great. You know, I'll just maintain that. On the other hand, sometimes we'll see like a car moving and I'll observe his behavior. And I kind of put observe in air quotes because his behavior is quite obvious in that, in that context. And I was like, oh, that's not really what I was looking for. So maybe I need to do some training here to, to get that behavior, to get, to get a behavior that I can live with when we see cars going by. I mean, really, I'm just living, living my life with my dogs the way that I, that I would normally. And then as we get to a new situation or, you know, some, some new picture, some new experience, I'll just keep an eye on him and you kind of ask him the question, you know, how's this for you? And just be ready to look for his answer and then adjust what we do at that, at that time. Is there anything about Figment that kind of feels new for you in terms of training?

I would say the biggest thing that's different with, with Figgy is that he's the first dog that I have that I've ever had personally in my house that is easier to stimulate with toys than food. And in fact, his food eating behavior was not really present when he first came home to me. Um, and it, it disappears rather easily. If we go to a new situation, we get out of the car at the park or at Panera or something. Um, he may not take food right away. And there are a lot of situations and there's situations where, you know, I've just, I've accidentally over-faced him and he's not taking food or toys. Um, but there are a lot of situations where we get into a new environment or there's people or there's other dogs and they're moving and he'll chase a toy, but not take food. And that's a new thing for me because for my other dogs, they would usually take food first. Um, and then the toy play would be the more fragile behavior. And with, with him, he may not take food at all, but he'd be willing to chase a toy. And there's a little bit of a trap there because one, having worked so hard to get rugby to play with toys with me, it feels really nice to have a dog that is so easy to stimulate with toys in that way. So it would be very easy for me to say, great, no problem. Don't worry about the food. We've got toy play and that's sexier anyways. So I'm just going to use the toy. Having worked through this with students and clients, I know that that's, that wouldn't benefit my long-term goals. That wouldn't kind of fit that theme of balance that I'm looking for with him. So I know that, um, okay, you're not taking treats. I need to go back a step. Where, where were you taking treats last? You know, where can you eat food, um, and work from there rather than blowing past that threshold where he can't eat food anymore. More and then just lean on the toys to, to get through it. That way is not going to get me what I want in the long run. It's going to be very limiting. Um, I'm going to eventually get stuck. I'm guessing at this point, he's probably little enough that he hasn't been introduced to much in the way of actual behavior chains yet. Right? Certainly not formally. Um, I mean, behavior chains are around us all the time. That's just part of how we naturally function in the environment. But I'm, I've not, we don't have really anything on cue. Everything that we're doing training wise is really just on, um, building, building fluent reinforcement behaviors and a few kind of movement skills and, and those really kind of foundational individual behaviors.

And way down the road, we'll work on turning those into, um, more formal finished behaviors. And once we have those really trained to fluency, then I'll worry about creating sequences or behavior chains from a performance standpoint. So before we get into that stuff too, too much, can you just explain a little bit kind of what a behavior chain is? Sure. So a behavior chain, and you'll, you will hear words like behavior chain and behavior sequence can be used. There's some debate in the behavior world as to what the definition of a chain versus a sequence is. There, there isn't a lot of agreement. So some folks have, have, um, their definition and other folks have a different definition. Um, I'm going to go ahead and just use behavior chain and behavior sequence pretty much interchangeably and talk about the phenomenon as a whole. And we'll worry about splitting down the jargon later, like in another podcast episode. Fair enough. So, so a behavior chain or behavior sequence. Is a, a sequence of behaviors that are held together with cues. And those cues can come from an outside source. Like if we're talking about a dog, they might come from the trainer or the handler. Um, but they can also come from the environment. Um, so if you, um, need to get in your car to drive somewhere, you'll perform a behavior chain. So you'll walk out of your house. So that's one behavior. You'll see the car and the side of the car tells you, Oh, or even more specifically, the side of your car with the door closed is a cue in the environment. How, if I'm going to drive my car, I need to open the door. So that's your cue to reach your hand out, take the door handle, pull the door open, which of course is its own little behavior chain. You can, we can, we can really zoom in quite a lot on these and go crazy. Um, now you're standing in front of a car with the door open. That's your cue to get in the seat. Now you're sitting in the car. That's your cue to maybe close the door. You're sitting in a car. It's not running. That's your cue. Oh, I need to put my key in the ignition and then turn the ignition. And so each, each behavior that you perform creates some change in, in the state of the environment and your conditions around you that then signal you to do the next step and the next step to eventually reach your goal of backing out of your driveway and driving to the grocery store to get some more Oreos or whatever. Um, so that's an example of a behavior chain where it's those, your actions changing the environment are functioning as your cue to do the next thing.

And of course, if you didn't know how to do each of those individual behaviors, you'd be in trouble, right? Like if you were faced with a, oh, and this has actually happened to me with a rental car before you can, you get in the car, you close the door and you cannot find where to put the key because it's one of those weird cars, um, with the, the new, the start. Yeah, exactly. With the new, you just sit there. Um, and so you sit there for a while and you're like, I guess I'm going to have to go ask someone for help. You're the chain broke because there was a behavior that was required in the middle there that was not yet fluent. Um, and then once you had that, oh, you learned how to do that behavior. You now, you know how to start this new weird funky car and you're able to complete your behavior chain. For anybody wondering, you have to step on the brake and then push the button. Usually. Yeah. I had to go back in and ask for help. It was really. I had to ask for help too. I could not figure that out. So to kind of get back to dogs for a minute, what are some examples of behavior chains that are helpful for competitive obedience? Okay. So in competition, really all of like the whole performance is a behavior chain from, from the time you get your dog out of the crate to when you put your dog back in the crate after or back in the car or whatever. Um, after the performance, that whole sequence of events is, is a behavior chain really. Cause you are, um, and it's, and it's one of those combination sequences where some of the cues are coming from the environment and some of the cues are coming from you as a trainer. For example, we'll look at the retrieve. You throw the dumbbell, the dog's still sitting at your side, and then you're going to give a verbal cue to send the dog to go get the dumbbell. At that point though, you're no longer giving any cues. The cues are all present in the environment. So the dog leaves your side, runs out. The side of the dumbbell tells the dog what to do with it. Do I put my feet on it? Hopefully not. Cause hopefully you've trained your pickup to fluency. So he sees the dumbbell. He scoops it up with his mouth, um, on the bar of the dumbbell. Now he's got the dumbbell in his mouth. That's his cue to return to you. He sees you standing there with your arms at your sides in that formal soldier kind of, kind of posture. That's his cue to come sit in front. And then at that point you cue, you know, the, the give, and then you cue him to come to heal. So you've given two of those behaviors or two of those cues for those behaviors. And the environment has given the rest of them.

So that's one exercise. But then again, that whole performance is a behavior chain. And we have sequences of behaviors that we have to perform to move from one exercise to the next. So once you're done with the retrieve on the flat, now you need to cue a series of behaviors to move your dog into the retrieve over the high. And then once you do that one, which is another little behavior chain, you have another behavior chain that links the retrieve over the high to moving over to the broad jump. I think we forget that there are still behaviors happening between exercise finished and are you ready? And so that's, that's something that I really have made kind of a personal project to, to figure out. I know your upcoming class kind of gets into this and specifically into behavior chains kind of in a big way. Can you share a little bit about that? Yeah. So that's really what the unchain, it's called unchain your performance, I think. And it's kind of a, it's kind of a joke because I can't do anything seriously. But the idea is that in order to unchain yourself from that feeling of having to have food in your pocket, having to have a treat in your hand and get multiple behaviors, we can build behavior chains, build these sequences of behaviors that end in the primary reinforcement, the food, the toy, whatever. So that's, that's the little plan, which I thought was hilarious, but maybe not everybody gets, but anyways, I think it's covered. And it is a common problem in that it is the nature of dog sports that we have to leave all of our sources of primary reinforcement, all the stuff that we've been using for months or years to train this dog to do this particular set of behaviors. And we leave them all over here on our crate. And then we have to go all the way into this other space, which is usually clearly delineated by ring gates or hay bales or ropes or something. But it's quite clearly a different room in the, in the environment. And there are no food or toys in there. And it does not take very many repetitions for your dog to catch on to the idea that she left all of the food over there, but we're going into this room where there is no food. And that's not, you know, that's not the whole, that's not the whole thing that makes, that makes performance hard, that makes competing hard, but it is a piece of it, right? And it is a piece that we want to account for. And so one of the things that we can do is we can teach the dog that by being very systematic, I can create the sequence of behaviors that does lead to access to the reinforcement, even when it's back at your chair.

So I can communicate that concept through really successful approximation. So it's shaping in a way in that we're, we're gradually building this, these increments of, of performance by holding the sequence, these sequences together in a continuous stream of cues and response and cue response, cue response that leads into the ring. We do the performance, then out of the ring and bam, that's where you get the access or access to your reinforcer. And all of that is connected instead of having a big gap where we've left the food and then nothing happens. And then I come ask you to a whole bunch of things and then there's a gap and then just magically food appears. So it, it doesn't work to just feed at the end of the performance. There has to be that, that connection and we need to condition the dog. We need to teach them that, Hey, this, what you're, the reinforcement you're getting right now here at this chair is related to the behavior you just performed. You mentioned in there, this idea that it kind of does give people freedom from treats and toys, at least on their body in order to get into the ring. But when you're talking about clicker training or things, folks often say not to bother loading the clicker anymore because dogs just kind of figure it out. Wouldn't, if we're consistent about rewarding when we leave the ring, would a dog just kind of figure it out that after they compete, they get good stuff. It's just in the next little bit of the room. Well, yes and no. If you were consistent with how you performed that whole sequence of events, then yes, it would, it would probably totally work. That's not usually the case in real life. So, I mean, so we certainly have examples of dogs being able to catch on to sequences of events as cues that reinforcement is coming. So, you know, for example, if you feed your dog at 530 every night, those behaviors that you're doing that are leading up to dinner time, your dog is totally aware of. And, you know, when you close your laptop and stand up and start walking towards the kitchen, your dog's already responding to that, right? Like, so that consistent flow of events that you're creating with your behavior there, if, you know, effectively becomes the conditioned reinforcer aspect would walk forward in time from, you know, scooping the food into the bowl to walking into the kitchen to, you know, standing up and walking, or I already said that, walking in the kitchen to closing your laptop and then walking into the kitchen, right? So, yes, that effect is there.

However, it does depend on how good of a predictor your behaviors are, which requires consistency. When we're talking about something in the real world, like a performance, there's a lot of stuff that happens in between. You know, if we're talking about a two, five, maybe even an eight-minute long obedience run, that's a lot of stuff to depend on just repetition. We can do better than – like, so there's a lot left to chance. Like, could the dog figure that out? Yes, and probably some dogs do. But we can do better than that by breaking it down and being systematic and deliberately building that, you know, from the ground up or from the chair back or however you want to think about it. Right. So that we know for sure that there's a connection instead of just hoping that if I just do this 100 times, eventually it'll come out right. Because there's – your dog could be learning so many things. And if you're inconsistent in that space, like sometimes you come out of the – sometimes you come out of the ring and you continue straight to your crate and you give them the meatball. But sometimes you come out and somebody says something to you and you look away from your dog and then you forget where your chair is or you get there. And there's – stuff happens, right? The bigger that space is, the more likely that there's some external variable is going to come in and just mess up your party. It's just easier. It's more effective to just be more deliberate about how you build that. It kind of feels like, you know, looking at this, that there are kind of two approaches to this whole deal of like helping your dog understand that the ring has value, right? So the idea of building reinforcers you can bring into the ring with you, like personal play, which is a big topic at FDSI. And then this concept of kind of teaching the dog that the good stuff will come once they're all done and they get back to their chair or their crate or whatever. You know, are some dogs better suited for one approach or the other? I don't think it's an either or kind of thing at all. It's just incorporating – however, again, the whole performance is a sequence of behaviors. So part of that sequence can and should, in my opinion, include a series of, we'll say, very easy behaviors, like preferred behaviors, like play. You know, ideally, play is very high frequency. It's a very easy behavior. It's very cheap for your dog because it's so fun, right? So there's some behaviors that are easier.

As part of your ring performance, some of the behaviors you're going to be asking of your dog are going to be a lot harder, like finding the correct scent article under pressure while there's some strange man staring at him, holding a clipboard and being very judgy. So it is, I think, very helpful to apply a little bit of the easy, hard, easy kind of pattern that we use in training a lot where you ask for something a little bit harder and then you ask for something easier and you reinforce it. And then you ask for something a little bit harder and then you ask for something easier. We can play that pattern out in the ring by I'm going to ask you to find the correct scent article, return with that, take it, call to heal, exercise, finish. Now I'm going to cue an easy behavior, which is playful interaction with me, whatever that looks like for you and your dog. And that's, again, those are behaviors. They are behaviors that need to be trained and conditioned separately out of context and then you can work them into your performance. But they still have to be, that still has to be something we have to condition the dog to expect. We have to build it, again, be systematic, be deliberate about building those easy behaviors into their performance so the dog knows what to expect. And that's part of what makes it easy. The easy things are things we expect. He knows that, oh, and then we play and she'll pet me. And then at the end of that play session, there's another call to heal and we go do another thing. And then there'll be another play and she'll pet me. And then she'll call me to heal and do another thing. And then after that, we get my leash on and we go to my chair and I eat my cookies. So they can have all of those things. And it's not one or the other, but it's looking at the whole picture, right? And being thoughtful about how do you want this to happen? What are the actions you're doing? The cues that you're giving to your dog that tell the dog what to expect, what's next, what behavior should he perform? And then being ready to give those cues so that you're maintaining that continuous interaction. We would call it connection in the ring, right? There is a really kind of common phenomenon that I experienced with my own dogs. They didn't really know what was going on. And I've since seen a lot of student dogs and realized, oh, this is something we need to train for. And it's that we are often very good at incorporating play behaviors at the end of some training exercise that we do. So we call a dog. Recall, the dog comes front. Finish. Exercise finished. Yay. Good boy.

All you're amazing. And you're beautiful. And, you know, we pet and we play and we do all this beautiful play. And then that's the end. But we have to have a very clean way to go from I'm petting and playing you to call the heel. And what I noticed with my own dog is when I would stop petting him and I'd pull my hands back up and I'm ready to move on to the next thing. There was this like withdrawal kind of effect where he would stand and just look at me and be a little bit flat. And there was a little there's a question mark on his face. And I didn't realize it in real time, but I saw it on the video. You know, so many things are clearer on video after the fact. I was like, oh, let's try replicating this. Maybe that was just in the ring because he was stressed. And so I tried it in my front yard and damned if he didn't stand and stare at me in the front yard when I tried to move from play back to call to heel. It's like, oh, OK, this is a chaining problem. I need to be able to I need time that call. One, I need him to know to expect that this play session will end with another opportunity to work. Now, hopefully that opportunity to do those behaviors is also positively trained and so isn't perceived as aversive. That's part of my job. And then I need to time that cue for while we're still engaged in the interaction, because if I am petting him and we're engaged and then I just stop playing and like take a moment to collect myself, he's just standing there looking at me and then I say, you know, heel. And he's like, what? And there's two things. One, that ending of the play is potentially aversive. Like that's you're taking the toy back. Whether there's a real toy there or an imaginary toy, there has to be something to fill that space. So I wanted I realized I had I was having gaps in my performance and it was it was making the setups at the beginning of each exercise harder than than they needed to be, because there would be a disc there would end up being a disconnection in between the exercises. Even when I thought I was doing a good job at maintaining the connection, there was still just that little bit of a question mark on his face. And then subsequently, when I would ask him to come to heel to set up for the next exercise, he would be a little slow, a little bit panty. I would and then I would fall into some horrible habits of like patting my leg and shuffling my feet and repeating cues, which I never do in training and only add to the weirdness of the ring performance. Like most people probably wouldn't think about that, right? Like you're you're giving your dog a reinforcer.

OK, I did a good job. OK, now I can get back to work. Like from the human's perspective, that just makes sense. But from the dog's perspective, I could certainly see how that would feel a little bit jarring to be like in the middle of this interaction and have somebody be like, OK, time to go. Especially if they didn't even say it, if they just stopped, like you're eating lunch with a friend and you're having a conversation and she just gets up and leaves. And you're like, what? But we tend to rush dogs with reinforcement anyways. I think it's just more it's more obvious when there's not a physical thing in involved. Like food is relatively easy because the food is swallowed and then it's gone. And then that is very clear signal that that reinforcement is. And both of you are aware of that. So there's there doesn't have to be an in-between, though we still tend to rush dogs. Hey, come on back. Come back. Let's go. Let's go. Whereas we could let them swallow, let them re-engage and then give the next cue. With toys, it's a little bit harder because the toy is still there and you have to take the toy back. We still have a tendency. We get in a hurry as trainers and we want to rush the dog back so we can do the next thing. So give me the ball back and maybe we reach towards the ball and the dog is not aware that the reinforcer is over just yet. I'm still pulling on your toy. And then when there's not a toy there at all, I think it is even more it's even more abstract. So we really have to be thoughtful about how are we signaling that now we're going to the next thing and make sure that that transition from this easy behavior to this new next thing, this new harder behavior is not a surprise that it's expected and that it's positive, that the dog has good feelings about that transition. So to shift gears, I guess, a little bit, you know, we've talked a lot now about behavior chains and kind of the intentional, careful planning that it takes to, you know, think through, okay, these are the pieces and this is the order I want them in and these are the bits in between and I want to think about that. What about unintentional behavior chains? Yeah. Let's start with the obvious. Is it possible? Of course, it's possible. It happens all the time. I mean, again, behavior chains are just that's how we interact with our environment. There are many, many things that we do where we have to do a long sequence of different actions to get whatever outcome is that we're after. And we can certainly set up what happens. It helps in the people, but we'll look at dogs.

That's what we're interested in right now. It certainly happens in the dog world. Many of us have experienced the undesired behavior chain of the puppy that jumps up at you and then sits. And then I'm trying to teach you to plight greet. And the greeting that we end up living with or we're settling for in the short term is the puppy jumps up and then sits. Did you see me? I sat. Did you miss it? Let me jump up and then sit again. These sorts of things can happen in lots of places where there's some behavior occurs on the way to the behavior that you want to reinforce. And then it gets built into that sequence of behaviors. Of course, it's harder to do that if it's a behavior chain you want to occur, right? That's like the Murphy's Law of dog training kind of. But if you want the behavior sequence together, it'll take like months of careful planning and successful approximation to create that structure. But if it's a behavior that you don't want because it's annoying, like vocalizing, like squeaking in your crate or something like that. Or jumping up and then sitting or ping-ponging to the end of your leash before turning to ping-pong. Yes, ping-pong hitting the end of your leash and then coming back for a treat and then hitting the leash and then coming back for the treat. Those things, of course, you only have to reinforce them like one time and you've bought it for life. So the trick for those unintended behavior chains, the undesired behavior chains, the ones you don't want, is to reinforce before the undesired behavior happens. So click before the puppy jumps up, which does mean you're clicking before they sit, but you're clicking before they jump up and it interrupts the undesired behavior chain. It's the universal trick for fixing that in all cases. Before the puppy squeaks or before they hit the end of the leash. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes. Click before the thing you don't want to happen happens and it interrupts that chain and you can get the reinforcement that was going to come at the end of the chain is now coming. You're short-circuiting. You're making like a little shortcut to that reinforcer. You don't have to sit. You don't have to jump up. Great. Now you're just stopping two feet away from me or in the case of hitting the leash, you're maybe even just dipping your head and looking right back. Bam, I'll reinforce that because that for me is a lot better than having my shoulder snapped. Every three steps. Depending on the size of the dog. But yeah. All right. So I've got one last question for you, Hannah.

It's the new last question I've kind of been asking everyone when they come back on. So what's a lesson you've learned or been reminded of recently when it comes to dog training? I would say something that figment has reminded me of frequently right now is the importance of setting up the environment to make the behavior that you want very, very easy to happen. And the behavior you don't want to see very, very unlikely to happen. So that he's always rehearsing the things that you like so that you have opportunities to reinforce them. And rarely, and hopefully never, but probably because we're all human, rarely practicing the behaviors that you don't like. And I think that's the most unpredictable features of the environment that I need to change his behavior around. So I would say that's something that I am having to think about. You don't think about it as much with your adult dogs, with your old dogs, because they have their habits. Like we have our routines. And so those types of things are now very much unconscious. But with the new puppy, he doesn't have those routines yet. He doesn't have a lot of habits yet. I do have habits. And some of my habits are not setting him up for success. So I need to change my behavior so that he's always rehearsing the things that I do want. If I catch myself starting to feel frustrated because he's practicing behavior that I don't like because it's annoying or frustrating or dangerous, I need to change my behavior to change his environment so that I have what I want so that I can reinforce it. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Hannah. This has been great. Awesome. Thanks for having me. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Shea Dwayzel. We'll be talking about crucial concepts for competition. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice. There are next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Thank you.