Lee Charles Kelley
Posted : 3/20/2008 10:42:26 PM
ron2
And what brings the dog to you is not the emotional satisfactions of breaching an inhibition but the chance for reward. whether that involves pushing against your hand, or sitting, or breaking off the chase with the cat. In our house, nearly anytime he chases the cat, it is play and nearly always, it is a chase she instigated. So, in essence, I am saying that the reason the dog responds is not from a pure energy exchange or any emotional nature of the push exercise but a more base motive, which is to gain reward, often in the form of food. In other words, the working for reward is, to me, a simpler explanation than supposing the emotional states of the dog or trying to parse out varying emotions and degrees of emotions.
I'm puzzled by your explanation. I'm assuming you've never done the pushing exercise, or that if you have you've only just started doing it. Because I've been doing it for almost two years now, and I've never seen any indication that this in any way promotes reward seeking behavior, or that it has anything at all to do with the dog being rewarded even. The pushing does not cause the dog to push into you whenever he wants food, or ever, actually. It could, I suppose, in some dogs, but I've never seen it or heard of it happening. The way it's set up is very specific: you put one hand against the dog's chest, put food in front of her, and you pull the food away slowly so she has to push into you to eat. And most of the dogs I've done it with, even those who take to it fairly quickly, don't really like doing it initially. Many of them seem peeved that they have to go through all this fuss just to eat their dinner! They seem glad when it's over. They do NOT seem to view it as a reward. The reward, if any, comes gradually, in the form of what I would call increased drive flow. (Now there's a phrase you've probably never come across before.) So Corvus is right in a way, that's not about increasing the dog's drive, per se, but improving the way it flows, clearing the internal blockages. And whether the dog likes it or not, the exercise does something positive that she's not even aware of, and you wouldn't be either until a few days or a few weeks later.
Also, the +R idea that dogs learn through positive reinforcement, while a pretty darn good approximation of how learning takes place, is still, in my view ever-so slightly off the mark. Admittedly it's close enough to being accurate that I have no problem telling my clients to give their dogs "positive reinforcement" for good behavior. But in my view, behaviors are only learned when the dog's internal tension is relieved. That's the reinforcement for all learned behavior as well as the impetus behind all instinctive behavior. When a dog feels a strong reduction in tension, he feels better, and starts doing the thing that reduced his tension in the first place. This is why Corvus' bunny chews cardboard. Or why a dog comes when called. It doesn't matter what form of training or ideology you use, the dog obeys because he associates the behavior with a reduction in tension. And technically, that's not positive, but negative reinforcement.
Sorry, I got off on a tangent.
But again, there has never been any indication to me that when a dog's recall is improved by doing the pushing exercise (something Neil Sattin pointed out) the dog shows any signs of coming in order to get a food reward, The act of coming to you IS the reward, because the dog has either learned that it reduces his inner tension, or it just does so innately for some, possibly unknown, reason.
LCK