Last week I talked about the placement of rewards. This week I’m going to discuss something even more important – your timing.
A Lot Can Happen in FIVE SecondS
You’ve got a brand new puppy that you’re just starting out with, and it’s her first training session. You decide to start with the basicest of basics – Sit. Because we’re training a young agility superstar, we want a nice straight sit, with the puppy’s back legs underneath her.
Your puppy sits. You reach into your pocket for a treat. Your puppy yawns, turns her head to watch a butterfly float past, then flops her hips sideways into a puppy sit. You remove your hand from your pocket and feed the treat to your puppy. What did you just reward?
Your puppy has no preconceived idea of what behaviours she gets rewarded for, and what she doesn’t. The most recent thing she did is flop her hips sideways, so that’s going to be most strongly associated with the reward in her brain. Before that she was watching the butterfly … and before that, several seconds ago, she sat.
Your puppy will eventually learn that when she sits she generally gets treats a few seconds later. The slower you are at delivering the treats, the more repetitions it will take for this to sink in. With each one of those repetitions, you may be rewarding behaviour that you don’t want as well – like watching butterflies and flopping into a puppy sit. These behaviours may pop up to haunt you at a later date.
The sooner you can get the treat to your puppy, the stronger the connection between the sitting and the treat will be, and the quicker she will learn.
Progress in No Time
Slow treat delivery also slows down your training in a very literal way. Imagine that one dog trainer (Alice) takes six seconds to deliver a treat to her dog, while another trainer (Belinda) only takes two seconds. Belinda can achieve twenty repetitions in forty seconds (excluding time for her dog to chew). Alice is literally going to take three times longer – two whole minutes – to do the same amount of training.
This is not hypothetical. In her excellent book The Culture Clash, Jean Donaldson discusses an experiment where she videoed two groups of people training their dogs. One group consisted of first-time dog owners, while the other contained professionals and other highly-skilled dog trainers. The inexperienced trainers delivered feedback (rewards or punishment) to their dogs 2.8 times every minute. The experienced trainers managed to squeeze 10 pieces of feedback into every minute – they were literally getting three times as much training done in the same amount of time.
Keeping Your Dog In the Game
When you’re watching a car chase scene in a movie, your eyes are glued to the screen and you’ve temporarily forgotten that your foot has gone to sleep. When the screen shows some boring scenery, you might briefly look away to scratch an itch, or even check your phone.
You are your dog’s movie. If you’re providing lots of feedback in a short space of time, your dog is not going to have time to think about the other things that are going on around him. When you take a long time to deliver rewards (and especially when you take a long time to reload after each reward), you run the risk that your dog will find something more interesting to look at.
How to Speed It Up
The good news from Jean Donaldson’s experiment is that timing improves with practice, and after you’ve trained a few dogs you too will be delivering ten pieces of feedback a minute. In the meantime, there’s a few things you can do to improve your training sessions:
- Keep a treat in your hand so you’re always ready to go. Put the rest of the treats in an open container or a treat bag nearby, so that you can refill quickly. When I’m training in my garden, I like to put a bowl of treats on top of my wheelie bin.
- Have a clear picture in your head of what you want to reinforce. This can be a struggle if it’s your first dog and you aren’t exactly sure what the finished product should look like. Ask your instructor for clarification or look for videos on YouTube to help you get a better idea. If you know what you’re looking for, you’ll be able to reward it straight away, without any thinking time.
- Don’t push for too much duration too soon. If you can a fraction of a second in the position that you want, embrace it. Once your dog is offering the behaviour straight away after each reward, you can start withholding the treat for a second or two, and gradually build up.
- Break skills down into small parts that you can work on separately. If you ask for too much between rewards, you may find your own concentration wandering, and miss things that you should be reinforcing. Short repetitions are good for your dog’s attention span too!
- Practise your treat delivery without your dog. I’ve been to a couple of dog training seminars where we’ve worked on this skill by “feeding” a chair. One was held by the late Sophia Yin – and here’s a video of one of her exercise. The dog trainers are supposed to feed their “dogs” as soon as possible after the ball hits the ground.