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jmurr
MH
Posts:158
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| 10/07/2008 3:20 PM |
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| Cj must be away for a while so I should probaly wait on this 'til he returns - but
what the H...
He talks of training a dog such behaviors as "whoa" until the response becomes
"reflexive."
I'm wondering what folks' here experiences are with such an endeavor...
When done, does the training stay with the dog for life? Or does it need regular
refreshing with additional training?
The reason I ask is that the traditional dogma appears to be that trained responses
(as oppossed to natural or innate responses), in general, will fade or slowly
become less fixed in time if they are not reinforced. So, as time goes by, one
would expect a dog so trained to "whoa" will tend to get sloppy in it's performance
unless some retraining takes place from time to time.. See the above questions.
Ken Middleton told us of a way to avoid this a long time ago on this list. We can
talk about that later if folks want to.
Jere
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rospigan
MH
Posts:372
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| 10/07/2008 5:10 PM |
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Jere wrote:
>>>He
talks of training a dog such behaviors as "whoa" until the response
becomes
"reflexive."
I'm wondering what folks' here experiences are with
such an endeavor...>>>
Reflexive =
could it be that a stimuli triggers an action without the brain having a
conscious influence on the action? For example you can shoot clay targets or
birds in different ways. One way is to consciously follow the target and
then give lead and then pull the trigger. You can hold the lead for awhile and
decide when to pull the trigger. You can do this without much training if the
target is very easy. That would be a conscious action.
The reflexive
action to kill the target must be trained over and over again. You race the
barrel from behind with the target in an accelerating swing and just when the
barrel pass the target you pull the trigger and due to the accelerating swing
you will automatically get the needed lead independent of the target
speed and without any conscious and active calculation of the lead. Do
this 10000 times and you want know when you pull the trigger, the gun just goes
of every time it crosses the target. The action has become reflexive. The
less time you have to think, the better the method works. Superb when
hunting.
To me the
extensive shooting of clay during the last few years has changed my rifle
shooting also. I do no longer consciously pull the trigger. At the fraction of a
second when the crosshair is on the right spot of the animal the rifle fires.
This afternoon I followed a deer in the crosshairs as it was trotting over a
field. Finally it stopped and before I knew anything it dropped dead. In the
past I used to cautiously squeeze the trigger and still do so when
shooting at paper, but the extensive clay shooting has changed the way I
fire with a rifle when there is an animal to shoot at. To some extent it
scares me a bit since it feels like I cant control my trigger finger anymore. On
the other hand I believe that the action is not triggered unless everything is
unconsciously found to be correct, at least I hope so, and there is a conscious
part of judgement before I lift the gun so perhaps I am chasing ghosts only with
my thoughts.....
In the past I
trained particularly Foxy, but also Springer, to stop when I shouted the
"Stop" command. It did not mean "sit" or "down" but only "stop walking". The
reason was that Foxy always tried to walk further ahead of me when we were
just out walking and nothing else, to a neighbour
perhaps.
Then when I
reached her she, and likewise
Springer, just stood there with a slowly wagging tail and the expression on
their face and in their eyes said something like this: I stand here but I do not
know why I stopped and why I continue to stand? They both looked the in same way
and my conclusion is that we had trained the "stop" command so many times so it
had become a reflexive action for them and they stopped without thinking at all.
In this particular situation, without any other outside disturbance like game
birds or whatever it was easy to interpret their thoughts.
In a tempting
situation like when a bird flushes, the success of the method might be strongly
dependent of the dogs game sharpness. There is the force of the pre-trained
reflexive action to stop the dog but then there is a counter force from burning
conscious thinking like: "I got to catch the bird!" that tries to bolt the dog
forward. If this conscious force to bolt the dog is not that strong due to a
moderate game sharpness, then the reflexive force to stop the dog will win, and
you can say that the stimuli from birds in the air, or the handlers
command, triggers the reflexive action of stopping the dog, thereby
by-passing and blocking the conscious part of the dogs brain. A strong
game sharpness will override the weaker stimuli to reflexively stop the dog if
the stimuli to trigger a chase is strong enough. The dog might stop to a single
grey partridge but bolt after a covey of cackling snow-white grouse, the later
stimuli to follow the birds being much stronger than that of the dull single
partridge.
In this
situation, when the reflexive action is not strong enough to override the game
sharpness, another conscious action is needed, that is to stop because the
packleader tells me to stop. To stop as a conscious response to a demand from
the handler. Again the dog can choose between obedience and disobedience but it
will be a conscious choice.
Finally we have
the dog that gets a nuclear meltdown in its brain from the stimuli of wings in
the air and that dog can not be influenced by reflexive nor conscious
controlling stimuli, simply because every part, conscious and non-conscious,
of its brain has turned into smouldering nuclear
jelly!
Well, that's
what I think, for what it is worth...
>>When
done, does the training stay with the dog for life? Or does it need
regular
refreshing with additional training?>>>
Springer's "sit" did stay for life. We must remember that
every time we apply the command we also train the dog. Foxy did sit at the door
and took eye contact every time for nearly 14 years, when she wanted to go out,
even though we only demanded her to do so for only a few years when she was
young. Some things seem to stay for life while others have to be trained over
and over again. My feeling is that both the handler and the dog will try to
rationalize both their behaviour and relation to each other, as one year
together is added to another and the mutual respect and confidence becomes
cemented.
Torsti
Borta Med Vindens Kennel "Ask not what your dog can do for you. Ask
what you can do for your dog." www.rospigan.net |
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tc
MH
Posts:117
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| 10/07/2008 10:09 PM |
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Terry and Janet Chandler
Rugerheim Kennels
German Shorthaired Pointers/Horses
Las Cruces, NM
575-382-5231
Subject: [working-gundog] Training to "reflex"
>>Cj must be away for a while so I should probaly wait on this 'til he
returns - but what the H...
He talks of training a dog such behaviors as "whoa" until the response
becomes "reflexive."
I'm wondering what folks' here experiences are with such an endeavor...
When done, does the training stay with the dog for life? Or does it need
regular refreshing with additional training?<<
It has been my experience that ALL training has to be reinforced if you want
the animal to stay at a "high level" of performance. As far as how much
it depends on the dog. I have some dogs that need to have birds shot over
them almost on a daily basis to remain "steady". Others only need to have
birds shot over them on a weekly basis, and perhaps not even that often. Of
course, these are dogs that are actively competing on the "circuit". They
must perform flawlessly.
>>The reason I ask is that the traditional dogma appears to be that trained
responses (as oppossed to natural or innate responses), in general, will
fade or slowly become less fixed in time if they are not reinforced. So, as
time goes by, one would expect a dog so trained to "whoa" will tend to get
sloppy in it's performance unless some retraining takes place from time to
time.. <<
As a professional trainer, I am 100% agreement with the above statement.
>>Ken Middleton told us of a way to avoid this a long time ago on this list.
We can talk about that later if folks want to.
Jere<<
I guess I don't remember that. I sure would like to know how though, sure
would make my job easier
tc
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jmurr
MH
Posts:158
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| 10/08/2008 1:44 AM |
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| It was a long time ago, Terry. You may even have missed it.
What Ken talked about was training the dog the British "sit." Apparently their
field trials require absolute control of the dog (pointers) through the remote
"sit" (lay flat on the ground stretched out nose to tail flat on the ground on the
command "sit."
He said the dogs hate it. But they love to run. That's why they hate it - it
interupts their run. He found that after a while the dogs catch on - if they
comply to the "sit" command, they will be released to run and they begin to enjoy
(maybe) complying to the command.
I got to thinking about this when I got the latest Lab puppy (the black one you saw
in NM). He is a highly motivated dog wrt his desire to retrieve. The short of it
is I worked with him on sit (our kind of sit as we use it in controlling the dog
during blind retrieves) as a prerequisite to the release to retrieve. I would
command "sit" and quickly after he complied I'd throw an object and release him for
the retrieve. When he returned, I'd repeat the drill. I tried to be careful not
to make the act of throwing the object synonymous with the release command by
waiting a little between throw and release. As he seemed to catch on, I quickly
lengthened this time interval. Still being brief - in this way the chain, sit -
retrieve, gets built simultaneously and the execution of the retrieve becomes a
reinforcer for compliance to the "sit" command. Thus, in the dog's real world
workplace, every time the dog is given the "sit" command followed by a release to
retrieve, the "sit" command response is reinforced with this powerful natural
reinforcer. In hunting situations this appeared to be very effective and
resilient.
This past winter through summer I had an opportunity to see the effect of failing
to follow compliance to the command by a retrieve. We walk the dogs daily partly
on a road where there is traffic. The older dog has hurt his aging back and I took
to walking him on lead but allow the black guy to do his thing. When traffic comes
I control him with the remote sit when it appears best. Without the completion of
the sit - retrieve chain his sits became sloppy just as I suspected they would.
They sharpened up with just a few complete executions of the proper chain.
But, now Torsti is saying his experience might contradict the need for regular
reinforcement of a trained behavior...
So much to learn - so little time.
Jere
> Terry and Janet Chandler
> Rugerheim Kennels
>
>
>>>Ken Middleton told us of a way to avoid this a long time ago on this list.
> We can talk about that later if folks want to.
>
> Jere<<
>
> I guess I don't remember that. I sure would like to know how though, sure
> would make my job easier
>
> tc
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rospigan
MH
Posts:372
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| 10/08/2008 2:46 AM |
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>>>But, now Torsti is saying his experience might contradict the
need for regular
reinforcement of a trained behaviour...
So much to
learn - so little time.
Jere>>>
I mean, by the
examples I gave, that it depends of the individual dog, it's mentality, age
and experience and the nature of the situation. "Stay in the car until
given permission to jump out, even if the door is left open and I walk away from
the car", will, once thoroughly learned, be remembered by 3 out of 4 dogs
for life if there is no exciting temptation going on around. If you on
the other hand park the car by a lake and start to shoot ducks 20 yards from the
car with the door open, then I bet that only 1 out of four dogs can resist the
temptation to stay.
To go back to
my shooting: I believe that if I did not touch any gun for say 6 or 12
months, the reflexive pulling of the trigger would work a couple of times
when shooting clay. Then I would start to think and shoot more
consciously and start to miss more and more and had to train a lot to get
the reflexive shooting back into business.
If we trained a
birddog to a very high standard and then cease any field training and
hunting with it for a long time, I suspect that this would happen once we
took it out on the field again. At the very first flush the dog would
spontaneously respect the bird, doing so by an old reflex that pops up like a
program line of a computer program triggered by the previous line saying
:"777:if wing in the air then goto 778:" and next line:"778:stop".
(That is what I do at work when something unexpected happens that I have not
experienced for a long time but was common on some other ship in the past. I
make an often correct reflexive action without thinking)
Then, for the
dog, pleasant memories of old experiences would come up, the dog would get
very exited and start to act consciously and at the next flush we would have a
wild chase. That is my prediction and that is what I mean by saying that we must
also consider the continuous use of the dog as a prolongation to the actual
training. So if we do not actively train the dog anymore we still do sort of a
passive training by working it on the field.
Torsti
Borta Med Vindens Kennel "Ask not what your dog can do for you. Ask
what you can do for your dog." www.rospigan.net |
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rospigan
MH
Posts:372
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| 10/10/2008 2:57 AM |
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I have been thinking about what this "reflex
action" actually means, does the trigger of the reflex at all go
through the conscious part of the brain or will it by- pass that part of the
brain and go directly to some other part that controls the
muscles?
Then I remembered something that I read when I was
very young, a child actually. I was very interested in zoology and my parents
bought me books about the zoology science of those days. Someone had made
experiments with the common earth worm that we call the angling-worm. This worm
has no brain but it has a nervous system that resembles in appearance that of a
ladder, with one step in each of the numerous "rings" the worm is assembled
of and the two sides holding the steps going lengthwise from the worms "head" to
the rear. The worm lives in the soil underground but it can sense the
difference between light and darkness - among many other environmental
conditions.
In the experiment the worm was held in a dark
compartment. A light was put on and in the same moment the worm was given an
electric chock. The worm reacted to the chock by contraction. This was repeated
5 - 6 times. Then the light only was put on and no electric chock was
given. Still the now "trained" worm contracted every time the light was put on,
obviously it "expected" an electric chock also!
It is clear that you can "train" the worm but how
can you train a creature that has no actual brain? I do not know but if a
"reflex" is something that do not affect the conscious brain - then this worms
reaction must be as close to a reflex that can be!
Still, there must be something, some cells in the
nervous system that acts like a memory and triggers the contraction in
"expectation" of the chock. Gives us something to think about......maybe there
actually is nothing like a "reflex action", maybe it is just a name we have
given a specific type of behaviour? Can the worm be "de-trained" if the
light is put on many times in a row and no chock is given??? If it can, how many
repetitions are needed? Would there be a difference in the number of the
non-harmful light flashes to de-train the worm depending of if the worm is
"soft" or "hard" in "mentality", before the light can be put on without
triggering a contraction in the poor worm????
Torsti
Borta Med Vindens Kennel "Ask not what your dog can do for you. Ask
what you can do for your dog." www.rospigan.net |
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farmd69
JH
Posts:27
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| 10/10/2008 7:07 AM |
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Torsti,
A reflex action avoids going through the conscious part of the brain completely. Usually a reflex (Except for auditory or visual) never even makes it to the brain as the spinal cord receives the signal and sends the signal to the muscles to make the movement. That avoids the brain having to make any decision and makes the reflexive more much faster.
Worms don't really have a brain. They have a bunch of neural cells called a ganglia which elicits the motor response.....dogs and people have ganglia too and that's where a lot of our reflexes come from. Its faster than making the brain decide what to do.
Most athletes get their fast response from repetition of wanted behavior. That way the neural paths are already hard wired and ready for action without any conscious need for thinking. THe more you train the easier it is to do with a lot less thinking and the slowness to the wanted response that brings.
Can a reflex be unlearned????? Great question. Sometimes yes as long as you can wire another action to the stimulous. Or from lack of use the reflex MAY not be as strong.
Usually its a lot harder if not inmpossible to untrain a reflex.
SO train the dog right the first time.
Hey duck season opens tomorrow morning on my farm (and the rest of the southern zone in NY) We've had only 2 real hard frosts and bunch of small ones so the cover is still real thick around my ponds and sloughs (We don't decoy we walk jump shoot the ponds, sloughs, streams and backwaters)
The hatch looked pretty good around here for Wood Ducks and I've been seeing a lot of Blacks mixed in and staying around the sloughs. If the water levels are low in the county my place is VERY VERY good. If there is a lot of water the ducks are spread out everywhere and hunting is slow. We put in another 10 acres of ponds this August with $$$ help from some federal program but those ponds just have geese on them as the cover is a bit sparse. So who knows what's in store for the day. We shall see.
________________________________
From: rospigan@brevet.nu
To: working-gundog@web.whc.net
Subject: Re: [working-gundog] Training to "reflex"
Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 10:44:59 +0200
I have been thinking about what this "reflex
action" actually means, does the trigger of the reflex at all go
through the conscious part of the brain or will it by- pass that part of the
brain and go directly to some other part that controls the
muscles?
Then I remembered something that I read when I was
very young, a child actually. I was very interested in zoology and my parents
bought me books about the zoology science of those days. Someone had made
experiments with the common earth worm that we call the angling-worm. This worm
has no brain but it has a nervous system that resembles in appearance that of a
ladder, with one step in each of the numerous "rings" the worm is assembled
of and the two sides holding the steps going lengthwise from the worms "head" to
the rear. The worm lives in the soil underground but it can sense the
difference between light and darkness - among many other environmental
conditions.
In the experiment the worm was held in a dark
compartment. A light was put on and in the same moment the worm was given an
electric chock. The worm reacted to the chock by contraction. This was repeated
5 - 6 times. Then the light only was put on and no electric chock was
given. Still the now "trained" worm contracted every time the light was put on,
obviously it "expected" an electric chock also!
It is clear that you can "train" the worm but how
can you train a creature that has no actual brain? I do not know but if a
"reflex" is something that do not affect the conscious brain - then this worms
reaction must be as close to a reflex that can be!
Still, there must be something, some cells in the
nervous system that acts like a memory and triggers the contraction in
"expectation" of the chock. Gives us something to think about......maybe there
actually is nothing like a "reflex action", maybe it is just a name we have
given a specific type of behavior? Can the worm be "de-trained" if the
light is put on many times in a row and no chock is given??? If it can, how many
repetitions are needed? Would there be a difference in the number of the
non-harmful light flashes to de-train the worm depending of if the worm is
"soft" or "hard" in "mentality", before the light can be put on without
triggering a contraction in the poor worm????
Torsti
Borta Med Vindens Kennel
"Ask not what your dog can do for you.
Ask
what you can do for your dog."
www.rospigan.net
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rospigan
MH
Posts:372
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| 10/10/2008 1:21 PM |
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Ted wrote:
>>>Torsti,
A reflex action avoids going through the conscious
part of the brain completely. Usually a reflex (Except for auditory or
visual) never even makes it to the brain as the spinal cord receives the signal
and sends the signal to the muscles to make the movement. That avoids the brain
having to make any decision and makes the reflexive more much
faster.>>>
And also:
>>>Most athletes get their fast response from repetition of wanted
behavior. That way the neural paths are already hard wired and ready for
action without any conscious need for thinking. THe more you train the
easier it is to do with a lot less thinking and the slowness to the wanted
response that brings.>>>
Thanks for the explanation, Ted! I have told about
my new way of handling the rifle trigger due to extensive clay shooting with
shotgun. Now I also remember the way I drove a car in the past, when I had to
drive long distances. I was sort of broadminded when I was young and could for
example seriously forget where I had parked the car in the town and that was not
due to alcohol, believe me ) In those days I also had the habit, during long
drives, suddenly kind of "wake up" behind the wheel having driven
for perhaps 10 or 30 minutes without having any memory of how I had
done it. This could happen several times during a long drive. When I
"woke up" I often had an idea of about where I was but no idea of how the
driving had gone, like had there been traffic, had i overtaken some other car or
whatever usually happens in the traffic. This had nothing to do with being
tired, drugs or medicines. I have never eaten any medicines until this cardiac
thing hit me 2 years ago. Sometimes, still when I was a lot younger, something
similar did happen when I worked with something that was very familiar to
me.
The thing here is that I was in no way unconscious
but the conscious part of my brain was occupied by thinking of entirely other
things than driving or working. Obviously we have a simultaneous capacity with a
conscious part of the brain that can decide what is most important right now and
leave the less important work for the unconscious part of the brain.
A conclusion could be that even the unconscious
part of the brain can do pretty amazing things, like driving a car or guide the
body to do some work that do not need immediate intellectual
attention. When we get older we get more sensitive to stress and perhaps this is
one explanation to it. We loose the capacity to simultaneous tasks, like I
probably have done now to some extent, since I do know how I have driven now,
even if the drive was 7 hours long. Perhaps the sensitivity stress is
caused due to our conscious part of the brain now having to do all the work in a
situation when a lot of decisions have to be taken??
>>>Can
a reflex be unlearned????? Great question. Sometimes yes as long as you can wire
another action to the stimulus. Or from lack of use the reflex MAY not be as
strong. Usually its a lot harder if not impossible to untrain a reflex. SO train
the dog right the first time>>
Last night I
got 3 IS bitches to take care of for a number of days. One is 10+ years old and
a pleasant Dame. One is perhaps 5 - 7 years old (forgot to ask their age) and
fully tamed, with field trial merits, and there is nothing I want to change
in that Lady. The last one is a perhaps 8 - 9 months old wild thing that has
only been house trained and is pleasant and "safe" in the house but more or less
totally untrained outside. It has already developed habits that are bordering to
reflexive actions and I had to work hard this morning before I even got it to
walk to heel and "stay" without dipping its nose to the ground or pulling the
lead or bolting in any unexpected direction. The owner said that the bitch had a
memory like a gold fish = 4 seconds, but one more lesson in the afternoon
increased it to several minutes. The bitch does not even understand the
command "Here" and that is something I will start to work with
tomorrow.
Anyway I was
thinking while working with the bitch, that how much easier had it not been
if the training had started when the puppy was 8 - 9 weeks old! Now most of the
training is repair work, to untrain reflexes! Considering the circumstances the
bitch still is very responsive so I am pleased with it.
Maud seems to be down from the Norwegian mountains and
has got a hold of a computer since I just got a message that she will drive
home tomorrow and call once she has crossed the border to Sweden. She will be
home tomorrow evening after a 900 km drive.
They
have bad or even worse weather most of the time and very few
grouse.
Here at home the leaves have turned red and yellow
and have started to fall. Everything is very beautiful and one Sunday there
should be sunshine and warm weather.
Torsti
Borta Med Vindens Kennel
"Ask not what your dog
can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your dog."
www.rospigan.net
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jmurr
MH
Posts:158
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| 10/12/2008 4:38 PM |
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| So, do we suspect "training to reflex" results in a total bypass of the brain???
I would doubt that but strange things do happen in the universe.
Maybe its more like simply so enhancing "connections" they approach a "hard-wired"
state or tapping or transferring some aspect of the stimulus/response pair into the
subconscious??
Read this (in the hard copy magazine) last night as I was falling asleep. Seemed
interesting at the time...
Jere
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cwalt
MH
Posts:180
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| 10/13/2008 2:21 AM |
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| Jere Murray wrote:
> So, do we suspect "training to reflex" results in a total bypass of the brain???
>
> I would doubt that but strange things do happen in the universe.
>
> Maybe its more like simply so enhancing "connections" they approach a "hard-wired"
> state or tapping or transferring some aspect of the stimulus/response pair into the
> subconscious??
>
> rain>
>
> Jere
>
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Reflexive training is simply repetition training that demands a very
rapid response. It yields results that are not as fast as reflexes
(which bypass the cerebral cortex) but is faster than if the dog stopped
to think about the command. This should be done with control commands
such as whoa or halt since a rapid response can, under some
circumstances, save the dog's life. If training only for testing
situations one can by association train gunshot or flushing or flying
bird as 'whoa' commands. This isn't necessary with a hunting dog since
the subsequent interactions triggered by whoa are necessarily different
than that of a hunting test dog. [Reflexes don't bypass the brain but
interact at a lower level such as the brain stem. Example is the human
Babinski reflex, if you stroke the sole of the foot the toes curl
downward, this reflex is mediated by the pyramidal tracts in the brain
and is often used as a test of brain stem development in newborns.]
Anyway, there are a few training tricks that use canine reflexes as a
basis such as training whoa or preventing a dog from sitting at a command.
Cj |
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