Increasing Criteria and Expectations to Earn Reward With Behaviors that are Black and White as to Correctness
During the initial training of a behavior, criteria for reward is nothing more than effort. Then, with reward placement, we move the dog towards more complete or perfect performances. We gradually increase our expectations of offered behavior before we mark and continue trying to create even more perfect performances with reward placement. Our dogs give us feedback by either his successes or his failures. If the dog continues to be successful, we can assume that we are increasing criteria at a good pace. If the dog fails, we reduce criteria to keep the dog from failing twice in a row.
Eventually, the dog should be able to perform behaviors or skills that are either clearly right or clearly wrong perfectly without reward placement. We call these behaviors black and white behaviors. For example, performing a “sit” is black and white. The dog’s butt is either on the ground or it is not.
Once a dog has been trained to perform a black and white behavior consistently without reward placement, criteria for that behavior is always perfection. Don’t reward a dog for a down where elbows are raised off the ground or a down/stay where the dog is inching forward. Though criteria remains constant, the difficulty can be increased or reduced as well as the rate of reinforcement. The rate of reinforcement is simply how often you reinforce or reward the dog. We will discuss rate of reinforcement in more detail in a later section.
Expectations for Exercises With Degrees of Perfection
Other exercises are not black and white with regard to being performed to a right or wrong standard. These exercises have varying degrees of correctness. Examples of non-black-and-white skills would include sitting straight in the front or finish position and heeling in good position. The correctness of these behaviors is subjective. Whether or not these behaviors are correctly performed depends on the expected level of perfection.
For the most part, those behaviors that are in our more subjective group when it comes to criteria are more complex behaviors where there are elements of the behavior that can have clear right or wrong criteria and other elements that are subjective as to correctness.
When we train complex behaviors, we break the behaviors down into the smallest trainable parts. Initially, we train every piece of complex behaviors separately. Therefore each piece of a behavior must be evaluated separately as to which group it falls. Heeling is an example of a complex behavior where some pieces of the behavior belong in one group and some fall in another. When eye contact is required, success is black or white. Eye contact is either given or it’s not. Accuracy of position, on the other hand, is an element of heeling that is subjective. There is no clear right or wrong. There are only higher or lower levels of perfection. We train the black-and-white portions of complex behaviors first. Then we work on the more subjective skills.
When increasing expectations and criteria for reward with regard to non-black-and-white skills, our expectations increase gradually. We do not expect perfection. Instead, we gradually increase our expectations as the dog’s skills grow getting ever closer to perfection. How we handle these less than perfect performances vary depending on the skill being learned and the level of training the dog has reached. We’ll discuss more as we get into the individual behaviors and skills.
