Chaining the Barrel Pattern with R+

So…… the barrel racers got me hooked

I’m playing around with teaching Forrest the barrel pattern and I thought this was a good opportunity to talk about chaining behaviors together with positive reinforcement training.

When we chain behaviors, the previous behavior becomes the cue for the next behavior until we reach an end point with the usual click/treat reinforcement. If we’re doing our classical conditioning job well, then each subsequent behavior can also serve to reinforce the one before it.

Generally speaking once we’ve trained each of the individual “links” of the chain of behaviors we have 2 options:

1. front chaining and

2. back chaining

Front chaining means you start with the first behavior in the chain and add the links together in chronological order, seems logical.

With back chaining, we start at the end behavior and link things backwards until we get to the beginning.

This is how I’m training the barrel pattern and let me explain why.

When we’re practicing a chain, we get a lot of reps on the piece we add first, and fewer reps for the stuff we add later. So with front chaining we get really good at link A, not so strong with Link Z

With back chaining, the end is super strong, less strong with the beginning.

So you’re either working from well-known to less-known (front chaining) or less-known to well-known (back chaining)

With back chaining, the horse also clearly knows what he’s working towards - when the chain ends and reinforcement comes - with front chaining, the reinforcer comes after different links as the chain grows, she the ending point is less clear.

I think you can see how Forrest’s confidence grows here as he gets further down the chain because of back chaining! Cool, huh?

Chaining the barrel pattern with clicker training