Patricia McConnell—a
figurehead of the “positive training” movement—recently wrote a rebuttal to one
of my PsychologyToday.com articles (about the dangers to teaching formal
obedience skills to puppies before their brains, bodies, and emotions are
ready). You can read her critique here.
As I write in my reply,
my Unified Dog Theory series is an attempt to help end the divisiveness in the
training world, and also to help educate dog owners and trainers that there
aren’t just two training methods: the pack leader model and positive
reinforcement. There’s a third, called drive training, which has been used to
train working dogs—police dogs, herding dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, etc.—, for
far longer than either of the other two models.
Some might argue that
drive training is merely an admixture of classical and operant conditioning.
But I think a pretty strong case can be made for the idea that it operates more
along Freudian, rather than Skinnerian or Pavlovian, lines.
Remember, the concept of
positive reinforcement is really a clinical outgrowth of Freud’s pleasure
principle, the difference being that for Freud pleasure was not just the
addition of an enjoyable stimulus (or “reward”), but also the sudden release of
internal tension or stress. And that’s essentially how drive training works.
Freud and Skinner were
both influenced by Darwin.
According to authors Marc
Bornstein and Michael Lamb (Developmental psychology: an advanced textbook,
1999, p.20.), Freud’s interest in Darwin began when he studied biology in his
first year of medical school. Freud found the biogenic theory—ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny—particularly fascinating. And although that theory
eventually proved not entirely tenable, a modern version still holds as a
rule-of-thumb: if a morphological structure pre-dates another in evolutionary
terms, it also tends to appear earlier during embryonic development.
The forces of Nature and evolution
tend to iterate, and reiterate forms and patterns, both in the development of
the morphological traits of an organism, and in their emotional and cognitive
abilities as well. The thumb of our pre-chimp, pre-human ancestors slowly
morphed into the fully-opposable thumb of modern man.
This process is also true
of many cognitive abilities; they co-opt or base themselves on already
functioning abilities that lie lower on the psychological scale. For instance,
pattern recognition is an evolutionary pre-cursor to logic, language and math.
You can’t talk, reason, or learn multiplication tables without it.
In Freudian psychology,
“Developmental change is viewed as qualitative and stage-like, proceeding
through tension resolution from one stage to the next.” (Bornstein & Lamb) These developmental stages are important. With puppies, just as with growing
embryos, you can’t skip ahead or move things along too quickly or you’ll damage
the organism in some way. Nature and evolution have put those stages there, in sequence,
to serve a purpose.
There is plenty of
evidence to support the idea that pushing a human child to go through a natural
developmental phase too quickly may result in learning deficits, emotional
trauma, and psychological damage. Freud may have been off-base about some
things, but not this.
“What does that have to do
with puppy classes,” some might ask. “And what harm can they do if you’re using
positive reinforcements?”
In “Beyond the Pleasure
Principle” (1920), Freud wrote, “We have no hesitation in assuming that the
course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure
principle. We believe, that is to say, that the course of those events is
invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension, and that it takes a direction
such that its final outcome coincides with a lowering of that tension—that is,
with an avoidance of unpleasure or a production of pleasure. In taking that
course into account in our consideration of the mental processes which are the
subject of our study, we are introducing an ‘economic’ point of view into our
work; and if, in describing these processes, we try to estimate this ‘economic’
factor in addition to the ‘topographical’ and ‘dynamic’ ones, we shall, I
think, be giving the most complete description of them of which we can at
present conceive.” (The Freud Reader, 594-595).
The reduction of internal
tension is an actual, physiological process which can be physically measured in
any number of ways, in real time. The process of positive reinforcement cannot; it’s more of a statistical probability, measured after the fact. Physical
objects, events, etc. can only be classified as reinforcements if they increase
an organism’s tendency to repeat a behavior And the fact that many puppies, who
are put into obedience classes too early, forget everything they’ve “learned”
once they reach adolescence indicates that their behaviors in puppy class were
not really positively reinforced after all, because the learning faded over
time.
This brings up the belief
that dog training is a lifelong process. In their responses to McConnell’s
article, many of her followers insisted that training continues from the moment
you bring your puppy home up until the dog’s last breath.
This isn’t true. With most
of the dogs I’ve trained I’ve found if you wait until the dog is emotionally
ready for formal obedience, and you use the dog’s prey drive as the primary
focal point of learning, then at some point, no further training is necessary.
None! The dog knows his stuff and never falters.
Then there’s the problem
of whether or not operant conditioning is a complete and/or entirely valid
model of learning. Dr. McConnell is convinced that it is, despite the fact that
over the past year or so she’s had to give up two of her dogs—both purchased as
puppies from reputable breeders—essentially because she couldn’t figure out how
to train or condition them get along with her main dog, Will, a border collie,
whom she also purchased and raised as a pup.
Ian Dunbar, another
figurehead of the +R movement seems to have come to the conclusion recently
that “dog training is not working that well,” and that certain aspects of
operant conditioning are “hopelessly complicated.”
The problem may be that
operant conditioning, despite its effectiveness in laboratory conditions, is
just a model; it isn’t a real process. Pavlov didn’t think it was. Some modern
researchers, like Randy
Gallistel of Rutgers, are now saying that while classical
conditioning is real, operant conditioning may not be. Their research shows that
learning may actually take place, not through the law of consequences (a la
Skinner and Watson) but through the simple process of pattern recognition.
In a previous article here
I gave evidence that dopamine circuits in the brain, long thought of by behavioral
and cognitive scientists as “reward pathways” are actually attentional
pathways, switched on by both pleasant and unpleasant experiences, as if
telling the brain, “Pay attention to these patterns. Remember to do this,
remember not to do that!”
There are times when the
process of operant conditioning, through external rewards, coincides with the
reduction of an animal’s internal tension. So I’m not asking Dr. Dunbar or Dr.
McConnell, or their followers, to abandon the use of operant conditioning techniques
altogether, just to at least begin to entertain the possibility that it doesn’t
hold all the answers.
Dogs have been working
animals for thousands of years. In fact, it’s probably more like tens of thousands. It’s only since the advent of
behavioral science-0riented puppy classes that dog training, in Ian Dunbar’s words, “isn’t working
that well.” So the question becomes, should our pet dogs be trained as if
they’re no different than rats learning to run through a maze, or as if they were working dogs
whose instincts and emotions need to be put to use?
“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?”
Join Me on Facebook!
Follow Me on Twitter!
Join the Rescue Dog Owners Support Group!
Join Me on Facebook!
Follow Me on Twitter!
Join the Rescue Dog Owners Support Group!
No comments:
Post a Comment