Evening chill time... Will your dog rest? Or lunge at the cat?
Why might the same contexts trigger totally different behaviors in our pets? It can make their interactions really tough to predict...
In this episode, Naomi talks through the theoretical reasons why your pets' behavior might not be as predictable as the antecedent-behavior-consequence model seems.
What you'll hear in this episode:
the four (and a half) reasons* why different behaviors can happen in seemingly the same situation
how the intricacies of reinforcement can get complicated relatively quickly
why being a detail-oriented observer can help you predict your pet's behaviors
*note: there are MANY more reasons - these are just the ones I covered in this session :)
To listen to the full episode, click here to open it in your podcast player or press play below:
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…So an example, behavior-consequence. If you are singing along to the music at a concert because they're your favorite band and you know every word and a member of the band hears you and calls you up on the stage to sing with them, then are you likely to sing at future concerts? Yes, yes. Right? Because like, 📍 oh my God, fangirling, yay!
So today we are going to talk about a question that Joanne brought up that is really great and it made me think a lot about why behavior happens the way it does, because behavior is lawful. There are like actually equations - we're not gonna talk about equations - but there are actually equations that can describe why certain behaviors would happen at certain times.
So there's a lot to talk about with this question, which is: "Why does one of my dogs sometimes choose to leave the cat sleeping and other times jumps up towards the cat for no apparent reason?" This seems like the same context, right? Theoretically they should be doing the same thing.
So before we get a little bit nitty gritty about certain behaviors happening at certain times, I want to just review a little bit of the basic building blocks of behavior, which are the ABCs, the antecedent, behavior, and consequence.
So we're actually going to start with B. The behavior. What the animal is actually doing. And what we are most concerned about as trainers is how likely is it that that behavior is going to happen in the future? The goal is that the target behaviors, the ones we want, we want them to happen often, and with predictability. And for the undesired behaviors to happen less often. And so the likelihood of any given behavior is directly related to what tends to happen after the behavior, which is the consequence, the C.
We're gonna focus almost exclusively on reinforcement, and reinforcement is a consequence that the animal is willing to work for or to behave, to get access to. So it's something that they like, something that they want.
Okay, so an example, behavior-consequence. If you are singing along to the music at a concert because they're your favorite band and you know every word and a member of the band hears you and calls you up on the stage to sing with them, then are you likely to sing at future concerts?
Yes, yes. Right? Because like, oh my God, fangirling, yay. Right? Can any one of you think of a reason why they would probably be super likely to sing more? But it's not definitely?
Like, I think
I personally would hate the attention and would not want
that. Exactly. So even if they're your favorite band, getting called up on stage is not everyone's idea of a good time. So even if you love the music, you're like, this is punishing for me. So that consequence might not lead you to want to sing loudly at future concerts because, oh God, I don't wanna get called up on stage again.
But we're gonna talk more about that later... different consequences being reinforcing for different people or different animals at any given time.
So we talked about behavior and consequence, that little pair, but the context really matters, which the target behavior isn't likely to happen as much in certain situations as it is in others.
So the frequency of that behavior isn't just dictated by the consequence, it's also directly related to the context in which it's happening. So we're talking now about the antecedent, the A, which you can think of as the context for the behavior or the cue. And it's a signal to the animal that there is a certain suite of behaviors that are appropriate in this context, and the animals will know which behaviors are in play because theoretically those behaviors have led to something good in the past, so they've been previously reinforced.
So let's take the singing example again. You're at a concert and you singing is one of the behaviors that is cued by the concert context. There's also other behaviors like dancing, maybe drinking alcohol, maybe taking videos on your phone, whatever you do at concerts, that's the suite of behaviors that is cued by that particular context.
But let's say you're taking a math exam, which is going to cue a totally different set of appropriate behaviors, like looking at your paper and writing with a pencil. And most importantly, you're pretty unlikely to start singing. Because it's just not part of the behavioral repertoire that's related to that particular context.
And probably if you thought ahead, say if I started singing right now, what would happen? You'd probably get punished. Most people don't sing during math exams anyway.
So here's the whole little like behavior sandwich with the target behavior in the middle. And so if the behavior has been reinforced in the past, it's likely to happen again, but most likely in the context that it was reinforced previously.
So what's important here and why we're talking about this in the context of our main question is this cute little ABC sandwich just doesn't represent the complexity of behavior in context and consequences very well, the ones that happen in real life. It's too simple. Because if it did represent real life well, then we wouldn't be trying to answer this question.
We wouldn't be dealing with situations where you would expect that one context would lead to one behavior, but actually it leads to a bunch of different behaviors.
So we're gonna take a look at the cat dog example that we're gonna use for the rest of today. So we're gonna say that the antecedent is that the cat goes to hang out or sleep on the back of the couch in the evenings. We have our little moon here. We have a little kitty. It's adorable. Okay. Our target behavior, what we'd like the dog to do, is that the dog would notice the cat up there, but then would go and lay down on his own or do his own thing, not focused on the cat. We also have an undesirable behavior where the dog gets excited and puts his paws up on the couch and bothers the cat.
Well because both behaviors are happening, they must be being reinforced in some way. That's just the law of reinforcement. If a behavior keeps happening, it's being reinforced. We don't know necessarily how it's being reinforced, but it's being reinforced.
So the question we are talking about is what are some reasons why there's multiple behaviors going on, even within one particular similar context. So we're gonna start with the simplest reason first, which is the one that sticks as closely as possible to the ABC sandwich.
And this is one that happens really often, so we should not discount. It. Um, why might an animal do different behaviors in seemingly the same context? Because the context might seem the same to us, but to the animal, it's not. So here's a really common example,
um, so my friend taught her dog to spin. That's the target behavior. And she got it to the point where if she just twirled her wrist, her dog was responding with a really quick, enthusiastic spin. Like 95% of the time it was beautiful, lovely. We kind of took a break, the next time she did it, I noticed that she moved her arm in a slightly different way.
So before it was just a wrist flick. And then the next time she was moving her arm a little bit more. And when she did that, the dog only did a spin like 75% of the time and it was super slow. You could see him thinking like, is that what I'm supposed to do? And the other times he threw out a play bow instead.
And she was like, but I'm doing the same hand motion. Like, he should know this, right? You've heard this all, he should know this. We've done this a million times. Right? And it was only when I showed her the recording that we were able to see that there were slight differences in her cues.
So even something as specific as like, we have taught this individual behavior based on this individual cue. We are getting different behaviors from a, a, a cue that we think is seemingly the same. Okay, so let's look at the cat on the couch example.
In this situation, there are so many potential slight variations in the context, just in the cat's behavior that we might look at and kind of classify as humans, we like to generalize a lot and we would say, okay, this looks like cat is resting on the back of the couch. So we would say this is the same context, right?
But there are so many things that we could kind of pull out and say something might be different here. Like the direction the cat is laying, like facing left, facing right? How they came up onto the couch. Are they sitting, are they laying down? What direction are they looking into? Are the, is the human close to the cat or are they far away?
Are you paying attention to the cat or are you not paying attention to the cat? Right? All of those, I mean, it could go on and on and on and on. All these different theories that we would have about what small differences are happening that could lead to different behaviors in the dog. And often it's only with careful, careful observation that we could even start to parse out what those small differences are that are relevant to the dog and that signal to them that jumping up might be the behavior that's best in that particular context versus laying down.
So moral of the story is we think the context might be the same, but it's not, or it's not similar enough to cue the same behaviors. This happens often.
So the next reason that is sort of related to number one is that it's very rare that a cue is so isolated that it translates directly to one particular behavior, like a complex context, like a concert or like any real life situation.
Just there's way too much going on to be able to say that only one behavior is potentially gonna come out of that. There's so many different things that, that factor into any given behavior. Um, and you can't just isolate one particular cue.
So in the couch scenario, it's possible that maybe the human is on the couch, but maybe they're not looking at the dog and the dog bed is available. There's lots of other things going on in the situation, and so there are lots of things that the dog could do. He could go sit on the bed, he could go stare lovingly at his human, he could spin in circles, he could, you know, try to raid the kitchen. He could bark, he could lay down on the floor, or he could jump up on the couch. And there are a million ways that any of these behaviors could get reinforced either by the human or by just the environment. So examples, the human could look at the dog and praise the dog, theoretically in response to a target behavior. The human could toss treats onto the bed if they see that the dog is offering a down there. They could scold the dog for choosing an undesirable behavior, which, you know, is a thing that people do. But if they weren't paying attention to the dog before that, then maybe just getting attention, even if it is a scold, is reinforcing. Or maybe the cat gets scared of whatever the dog chooses to do and runs away.
So the long story short here is that real life contexts are complicated and they often can cue a whole constellation of behaviors that have the possibility to get reinforced in a billion different ways.
Okay. So reason number three, and we've talked about this in the, like, oh, it was a while ago now. Um, I think it was like advanced Reinforcement Masterclass.
But certain behaviors are going to be more likely to occur because of how much history of reinforcement they have in that particular context. So let's be really simple here. The dog has been practicing whatever behavior it is for the past three months, and it's been getting reinforced by attention. And then you started teaching the dog to go to bed and reinforcing that with cookies, but because it's only been for three weeks, then we can assume that the undesired behavior is going to persist because it's been reinforced more.
Okay, so reason number four, another thing about reinforcement. So most of the time it isn't only that there are lots of potential reinforcers available in the context, and then there are some behaviors that are happening more than others, but importantly, those reinforcement options are not usually of equal value to the animal. So it's not just the number of times something's been reinforced, but how it's been reinforced.
And so, as we talked about in the concert analogy, the animal is the one who determines whether something is reinforcing. So for Deirdre, getting pulled up on the stage is like, worst nightmare, no thank you, that is not reinforcing. Whereas for someone else, that would be highly reinforcing. And if it is reinforcing to someone, we have to identify how reinforcing it is in relation to potential other reinforcement that could come from that particular context.
So for our target behavior, you might get something you like, so you're, you're gonna do it and it's gonna increase in frequency, but if the thing that happens whenever you do the undesired behavior is like a big fat party, even if you're reinforcing them relatively equally a number of times, you're still gonna get the undesired behavior a lot more often because the payoff's bigger.
So in our example, the dog really might like cookies a lot and they very much enjoy getting food when they choose to lie down in their bed when the cat is on the couch. And that's pretty great. They're perfectly willing to do that. But for that particular dog, maybe what's better is that when they put their paws on the couch and the cat freaks the fuck out and runs away, that is way more fun than getting cookies.
Let's just say. I don't know any dogs like that. Hmm. Anyway. The cat freaking out is much more valuable than cookies. So even if you're reinforcing them relatively equally a number of times, because the values of the reinforcers aren't equal, it's, you're not gonna see the same amount of behavior from each of them.
Cool. Are we ready to riff on this and get more complicated and nerdy?
So I'm calling this one reason 4a, and it's kind of like a sharp left into the depths of the mind fuckery that can be like delving into reinforcement and the values of reinforcement and messing around with that. So for a reinforcement can change in value and does fairly often. So if, usually, in our last example, freaking the cat out is much more valuable than cookies, which behavior are we gonna see more frequently? (Probably.)
Jumping to freak the cat out. Yep. Jumping to freak the cat out. So much more fun, right? Good. So what happens if you play with the dog a lot during the day and he gets his chase needs out in a much more acceptable way and maybe he's physically tired. What would happen to the value of the reinforcement of chasing the cat?
Hopefully the chase isn't as exciting. Right! It's probably not as exciting. So it's either getting close to the same amount of value as the cookies, or it could be even less than the value of the cookies. I don't know. I don't know how to measure that. But theoretically, right, which makes the behavior of putting the paws up on the couch less likely.
This is called if you really wanna look this up. It's called a motivating operation, which is basically stuff that's happened before the particular context affects the value of the reinforcer.
Importantly, it affects the value of the reinforcer, which then affects how frequently or intensely you would see the behavior that is associated with that reinforcer. I wanted to make sure that was clear.
Okay. So if the dog has played a lot and now the cookies and the cat are either of the same value or the cookies are even more valuable than the cat. Which of these behaviors do you think is more likely to happen now?
Hopefully the dog stays on the ground?
Hopefully, ideally that would be nice, wouldn't it? I mean, theoretically the cookies are better and so we should see more laying down behavior. Um, and in this simple example with no other information, you would probably be right, but , but, it's always more complicated than that.
And I wanna now combine all of the things that we've talked about because it's not just about the value of the reinforcement changing, but we also have to factor in the reinforcement history of each of those behaviors as well. These are like knobs you can toggle on and off.
A friend of mine - Ran from the Dog Behavior Institute, has a Master's in ABA - and I have a question out to them basically like, is there ? Is there like equations or ways to predict how these things interact? But right now we're kind of in thought experiment land.
So going back. If, um, scaring the cat is more valuable than the cookies and both of those behaviors have equally deep reinforcement histories, which behavior would we anticipate is most likely to happen more often?
Depends how lazy the dog is.
Yes. So it depends on other motivating operations. But without any more information because the value of freaking the cat out is more than the cookies we would think to see paw up on the couch slightly more often.
But next thing is if freaking the cat out is more valuable and putting paws up on the couch is way more practiced, what would we expect? If freaking the cat out, which is the reinforcer for putting the paws on the couch is more valuable, and that behavior has been reinforced way more times than the new behavior, what would we expect would happen more?
Dead cat?
Yes. Putting paws up on couch would happen more often, right?
We have a combination , we have a combination of a highly valuable reinforcer and a deep reinforcement history, right? All right. Now... what if the target behavior has a much larger reinforcement history, but the undesired behavior, the value of the reinforcer is higher. And I'm gonna tell you, I don't know the answer to this!
Um, but this is where it gets complicated, right? We're trying to think, um, in Joanne's case, right? You're like, I have practiced with Jasper a bajillion times to lay down on that bed, right? A bajillion times. Why is he still doing this, this explosive thing? Why? Well, I mean, it could be something like this, right?
Where freaking the cat out is so valuable that it overrides even the deep history of 📍 reinforcing the target behavior.
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