Shame on me for not blogging each day as it happened. Now my feelings as the days pass are mixing with my feelings at the time. Oh well!
When I first signed up for ClickerExpo, the number one thing I felt uncomfortable with was Shaping. However, after successfully shaping a spin in either direction, I was feeling alot more comfortable with that. (Sidenote: Oh my goodness! I just rewatched that video – Gitta was so TINY!!!). My next big challenge was around cueing. I was having trouble getting things on cue. It took forever for me to get my first few behaviors on cue. Then I taught one more thing and all her cues fell apart. *sigh*. So I was definitely ready to go on Saturday with my new favorite speaker: Kathy Sdao, discussing my new stumbling block: Cueing.
My first session of the day was “What a Cue Can Do: Developing Cueing Skills” with Kathy Sdao. Kathy’s lecture was full of fantastic analogies that made us realize the ridiculousness of our own assumptions. She pointed out that problems with cueing (for example, you give a cue but your dog doesn’t respond, responds slowly, or responds incorrectly) almost ALWAYS stem from either comprehension or reinforcement. Either they don’t understand or you’re not paying them enough. One of the analogies that I loved to answer the age-old statement “well – my dog should do what I say because I’m the boss” was something to the effect of “I [Kathy Sdao] am very clear on who my boss is. I know exactly who signs my paycheck. But if he stops paying me – I’m quiting”.
As for when to add the cue – I knew almost immediately that I had been adding the cue too early. I had been adding the cue as soon as I saw Gitta starting STARTING to catch on. Kathy says to add the cue when the behavior is happening so much, so fast, so consistently – you want it to stop!!! Incidentally, I bought Karen Pryor’s book “Lads Before the Wind“, in the bookshop. It’s a diary of her life as a dolphin trainer and it’s absolutely fascinating – partly because she was one of the very first. And you see the same idea of training a behavior fully before attempting to add a cue. This is a very different idea than traditional training, and though I did shape the behavior first, I think I still have an inclination to add the cue WAY too early.
Another mistake that she pointed out that I absolutely do is to give a cue, the dog does the wrong behavior THEN the right behavior and you click. In my mind I was saying to the dog, “That second one – THAT’S the one I wanted” because I clicked when she preformed the behavior I wanted (the second one). In actuality – I probably trained her to just respond to any cue with the first thing she thinks of and if she doesn’t hear the click – keep trying.
She had some more wonderful analogies comparing why a person might not respond to the cue of a green light while driving to why a dog might not respond to a cue you give. She made it seem almost ludicrous that so many people jump to the conclusion that their dog is spiting them or making a dominance play.
And lastly (at least for this blog!) she reminded us that we need to keep each cue salient. Meaning – the cue should leap out from the background. An interesting statistic: the human brain receives 400 billion bits of information per second, we process only 200 bits per second (one half of one millionth of what’s possible). Meaning – we filter out TONS of information that our brain determines is not relevant. Our cues can easily become non-relevant to the dog. Especially since they are not a verbal species and we usually choose verbal cues. They can easily cue off of any other consistent physical or tonal cue we give that we may not even be aware of. In another lab – they practiced training service dogs and people would have to give cues their dog understood without being able to see their dog. Many dogs don’t respond! They’re cueing off of eye contact and body posture. Kathy says she had people in her seminar wear sunglasses and suddenly their cues fell apart because they are unconsciously looking at a part of their dog (like looking slightly up for sit, slightly down for down) and their dog is cuing off of that rather than the word. Kathy didn’t explicitly state this (I don’t think) – but I think this very point shows why adding the command first (as is done in traditional training – you say sit from the very first sit) is so inefficient. You think you’re giving the dog a chance to hear the command over and over and over, but in actuality – you’re making the command irrelevant – part of the background. What’s much more important is the fact that you are putting a treat on their nose and pushing their rear end down! Once you finally fade off those movements, your dog isn’t even hearing the sit command and it’s hard to bring it back to the forefront from the background.
After lunch, I had the Cuing Lab session with Kathy Sdao. A continuation of the morning session. I think the biggest ah-ha moment I had here was seeing just how consistent you want the behavior before you add the cue. Additionally, the strategy of getting into a very constant rhythm of behavior-click-treat-behavior-click-treat so the first time you give a cue you are pretty sure they are just about to do the behavior. And lastly – realizing that you want the behavior so consistent – you are willing to bet $100 it’s going to happen when you give the cue. If you give the cue and it DOESN’T HAPPEN (when you are FIRST adding the cue) – abort. Go back to clicking every one. You have to win that bet over and over, if you can’t, you aren’t ready.
The two cueing sessions were probably where I learned the most at clicker expo, but that brief overview (I know it doesn’t SEEM brief!) will have to do for now 
My last session of the day was the Shaping Lab with Helix Fairweather and Joan Orr.
Once again I got to watch experts work with my dog The first thing they wanted to show was how to use shaping to teach an ‘off’ or ‘leave it’. This time they didn’t even ask for volunteers, Joan just looked right at me and said “Can I borrow your puppy?”. HA! I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that while all the other adult dogs where laying on their designated mats, Gitta was all over me and my non-working partner (a lady who was in the lab – but didn’t bring a dog) trying to get the treats 
Later they asked for volunteers for another shaping session. They tried to get a different dog, but they needed one that DIDN’T have a paw targeting behavior. No one fessed up – so Gitta got another session with one of the assistants. It was really quite remarkable. I think the thing I came away with was that the truly magical part of shaping isn’t he AH-HA moment when they figure out how to make you click. It’s the part just before that when they aren’t conscience of what is getting the click – but some other part of their brain makes them do it more anyway. That’s the power of the science. And that was one of my big takeaways from the expo. This is science. It has been studied. It works on all species (as Karen Pryor said later – any organism with a brainstem, that eats). We know that often science proves that things work in a way that is counter-intuitive. The earth goes round the sun even though it seems as if the sun goes round the earth. And the science of operant conditioning is a science.
After these sessions I grabbed all the books and videos I had brought with me (“Don’t Shoot the Dog“, “Take a Bow Wow“, “The How of Bow Wow“, “The Shape of Bow Wow“) and all those I had bought over the weekend (“Lads Before the Wind“, “On Behavior“, and two Kathy Sdao Seminars on DVD) and took them to the book signing. I got a thrill when Kathy Sdao looked at my nametag and asked if I had a blog and had blogged about the expo. Turns out – if you search ClickerExpo our blog is the second hit! She had seen my blog and even looked around a bit – yeah!! I gave her a little thrill (or maybe a scary feeling of being stalked) when I told her that all my training videos are on my ipod for easy viewing in the field. She laughed and said she never thought she’d end up on someones ipod!
I had dinner (along with the rest of the table) with Helix Fairweather and enjoyed talking to some of her previous CyberAgility participants. They all seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed the course! I also realized that I could probably hold my own session at next year’s clicker expo on how to do the typical things with video that dog trainers want to do. Cut scenes, add text, add music, do slow-motion. I’ll probably try putting together a step by step with the program I use to help out all those dog trainers out there that just want to post training video – not produce an academy award wining film.
And now – I’ve run out of blogging steam – but I think that covers day 2 pretty well. Day 3 is coming up soon!
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