PART 1

Crossover trainers seem to have significant problems in three primary areas - rate of reinforcement (how often to reinforce), timing of reinforcement (precisely when to reinforce), and establishing reinforcement criteria (what to reinforce). From your description, it sounds like you may have a problem in the latter area, establishing reinforcement criteria. What you may be having a problem with is what we call IMAGERY - visualizing incrementally (tiny bits) the behavior you should click for in order to eventually get to what you want. The process of getting there you already know as SHAPING.

Try this. Sit down someplace quiet. Clear your mind of conflicting thoughts. Concentrate on what your dog looks like. Don't worry at first what your mental image of your dog is doing - just get a good picture of your dog running around being a dog. If you have never done anything like this before, it may take several sessions to develop your imagination to this point. This is cheap behavior ;<). Doesn't cost anything. It is not tiring. doesn't even take a lot of time. You might try it at bedtime at first, while you are trying to drift off.

Once you can really see your dog in your mind, try to get that image to do something special - anything, just as long as the image is doing what you want it to. Sit, lie down, jump, or some other gross activity. Don't try barking. Most people, I have found, cannot visualize sounds (sounds funny, but it is true).

Once you can get your make-believe dog to do something that it normally does, try to get a NEW BEHAVIOR. Visualize this new behavior in its finished form. It is this finished form that you can begin to play with and ANALYZE to look for those little pieces of behavior that go to make it up. Since most behaviors are actually behavioral chains of greater or lesser complexity, you would visualize a BACKWARD chaining process in the way you would ordinarily get the behavior in real life. Run the image just like you would run a video, forward, backward, in slow motion. Pick those points where you might best reinforce.

I don't know if this sounds crazy to you, or if you have ever tried it before. I do know that once a trainer gets the hang of it, it becomes almost automatic. As you might guess, I use it all the time, and much of the time while training I am carrying in my mind one or more images of what I am looking for. I don't consider myself a great trainer, the likes of a Gary Wilkes for instance. However, I am good at what I do, probably because my timing is pretty good, and I visualize well. I didn't have any traditional training bad habits to unlearn, since the one and only way I have trained is OC (though not necessarily always with a clicker). When you have been doing something for about 40 years, you must have learned something;<).

This imagery process is used a lot in sports psychology. Some athletes are very good at picturing themselves doing things. Even chess and go players develop a knack of visualizing how various pieces are disposed on the playing board.

Once you have this (these) mental image(s) in your mind, it is now a matter of being prepared to reinforce in a timely fashion when the REAL dog begins to fit what you are carrying around in your head. How precisely you can fit together IMAGERY and REALITY becomes one of the determinants of how fast you can train.

Bob Bailey

PART 2

Sure, if you think it is worthwhile. As I said, is something that I do sometimes without even thinking about it. Maybe it goes back to my chess playing days, and I just fell into it when I started serious training with Keller and Marian Breland. I did find out that Keller himself did little imagery, but then, like me, he never claimed to be the world's best trainer. Again, like me, he was adequate to the task. He knew what he wanted (he had a VERY clear picture of what he wanted) and got into the ball park (sometimes by the "back door" as he put it), and then began to shape finer and finer bits of behavior until he got what he wanted. He did not, as he put it, build "little pictures" in his head. Keller thought it was neat that I could, and he appreciated how that might be useful. Keller sometimes made several false starts before he got what he was after. He was absolutely fantastic at developing short cuts (analysis) for mass production training. He was definitely a "BIG PICTURE" trainer who became bored with nitty-gritty. He was always looking for a faster way to get from point A to point B. His skill at observation was uncanny. He quickly picked up on behavioral nuances.

Kent Burgess, who learned from Keller and Marian, was ABE's Director of Training for more than 10 years (he finally went to Sea World as their first Training Director) and THE finest trainer I ever met. He was both an instinctive trainer, who had imagery to a fine art, plus a skilled technician who had a grasp of the technology as close to perfection as I have seen inside or outside a scientific lab. I feel fortunate that I had Kent as my teacher and mentor for almost two years.

If you feel it is useful, you may use the above too.

Bob Bailey