We think of cues as something you must deliberately attach to a behavior, with a reinforcer to follow. But you can also give cues that are purely information, not deliberately trained as antecedents to a particular response.
Karen's Letters
Operant Conditioning and the Traditional Trainer
By Karen Pryor on 04/01/2006As traditional training filtered down to new generations of instructors, the conditioned punisher and the conditioned negative reinforcer seem to have vanished. Nowadays, in my observation, most people just wham the dog without warning, so the dog has to guess what, if anything, he was doing wrong.
Clicking Raptors in the Saguaro
By Karen Pryor on 03/01/2006We're standing on a gently sloping foothill with Tucson's jagged volcanic peaks behind us, looking across the vast, flat Avra valley far below. The hills beyond that valley are in Mexico. The desert sky is a brilliant, piercing blue, filling the eyes with light. The mild warmth of the winter sun is welcome. This is Saguaro National Park.
Shaping Your Way to Success
By Karen Pryor on 02/01/2006"I can train ANY behavior that the animal is physically and mentally capable of doing."
—Keller Breland
Fading the Click?
By Karen Pryor on 01/01/2006When do I fade the click? How do I fade the click? We hear those questions all the time. The smart-aleck answer is "Never." Because we don't "fade" the click. Fading means doing something smaller and smaller until a tiny version of the original stimulus will serve, or until the learner no longer needs outside help to do the behavior. We don't do that with a click; either you clicked, or you didn't. Period. The term "fading" applies to prompts and cues; not to the marker signal.
