Let’s Talk Behavior Science

Hello friends!

Hope you all are doing well this week! Today I want to talk a little bit about something that isn’t directly PT-related, but will lay the groundwork for some other ideas I’d like to share and discuss with you all.

So let’s talk behavior science!

Have you heard of clicker training? If you’re familiar with dog training or marine mammal training, you’ve probably seen “clicker training” in action. Clicker training is also called positive reinforcement training, and our typical pressure and release training is called negative reinforcement. That terminology can kind of upset people, because it sounds like maybe I’m saying clicker training is good and traditional training is bad. But in this case we’re using the words positive and negative in the mathematical sense, meaning to add something or to take something away.

We get the names positive and negative reinforcement from behavior science. Remember Pavlov and his dogs? Classical and operant conditioning? If the last time you thought about that was high school - no worries! Let’s have a quick refresher.

When we’re talking about horse training, we’re generally using operant conditioning. Operant conditioning has 4 quadrants, which you can see in this lovely graphic from www.dog-training-excellence.com that I found on Google:

So positive reinforcement, or clicker training, works by adding something a horse wants (usually food) to increase the likelihood of that behavior happening again. Say we want the horse to pick up his foot. If he picks up his foot and we give him a cookie, this is positive reinforcement. 

Traditional training, or negative reinforcement, relies on the timing of the release of a negative stimulus to reinforce the behavior. If we want the horse to pick up his foot and we squeeze his chestnut until he lifts the foot and then release the pressure, this is negative reinforcement.

We also have negative and positive punishment, which I generally recommend we avoid completely in our training. Positive punishment is adding something the horse doesn’t like in order to decrease the likelihood of a behavior happening. If the horse nips at you and you smack him in the face, this is positive punishment. 

Negative punishment is a little harder to explain, but it is removing something the horse wants in order to decrease likelihood of a behavior recurring. With horses this usually comes in the form of withholding food or water as a punisher. An example that I think makes things more clear is taking a toy away from fighting children to punish them for fighting.

Hopefully all of that makes sense! If you guys have any questions, just shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to clear things up. I’ll be back next week to talk a little more about training, equine behavior science, and how I think this relates to therapy and rehabilitation.