Pies: In addition to "formal" forms of dog training (operant conditioning, reinforcement, or classical conditioning), dogs are

Evidence: 45 • authority: 92

The etymology of basic concepts in the experimental analysis of behavior.. The origins of many of the basic concepts used in the experimental analysis of behavior can be traced to Pavlov's (1927/1960) discussion of unconditional and conditional reflexes in the dog, but often with substantial changes in meaning (e.g., stimulus, response, and reinforcement). Other terms were added by Skinner (1938/1991) to describe his data on the rate of lever pressing in the rat (e.g., operant conditioning, conditioned reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and response induction and differentiation) and key pecking in the pigeon (shaping). The concept of drive, however, has largely disappeared from the cur…

Evidence: 45 • authority: 72

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behavior, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, other animals, and some machines. There is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. The changes induced by learning often last a lifetime, and it is hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be "lost" from that which cannot be retrieved. Human learning begins at birth and may even start before birth and continues until death as a consequence of on…

Evidence: 38 • authority: 94

Like the formal documentation/manualization of animal training, the formal study of animal behavior is also relatively new. What is now known as Classical conditioning was formalized and published by Pavlov in the late nineteenth century ( 24 ), only 13 years before the publication of Col Konrad Most's original training manual, and many of the advancements in science and working dog training practice unfolded contemporaneously. Although operant conditioning is a key process by which working dogs are trained, little research has focused on how to optimize training parameters to produce the most robust behaviors in real-world and distracting environments. Such research could be fruitful translational research to optimize training programs and enhance performance. Given the basic research on procedures such as errorless discrimination, concept formation training, and schedules of reinforcement, there are several potential training methods that could be deployed and evaluated for effectiveness and efficiency in training working dogs. Rather than representing a single learning mechanism, social learning refers to a constellation of learning processes in which information from other social agents influences the learning process. These processes range from simple cases of “enhancement” in which an individual's attention is directed toward important stimuli or locations via other agents, to imitative capacities, in which an individual acquires novel skills by observing and modeling the actions of others. As a highly social species, various forms of social learning are likely to be important to dogs. In the last two decades, much research on dog cognition has focused specifically on processes related to social cognition, yet little of this work has been integrated into applied training protocols. Below we highlight two promising areas of research, the first exploring conspecific social learning, and the second capitalizing on dog's abilities to learn socially from humans.

Evidence: 0 • authority: 90

Evidence: 0 • authority: 90

Evidence: — • authority: 38