How do Dogs Learn

Imagine the scene a young wolf or dog out exploring its environment, trotting round and using it senses of smell, taste, hearing and touch. In the undergrowth there is something rustling. The young wolf or dog smells a warm body. Suddenly the little animal scampers away moving as fast as it can over the ground to get away and hide somewhere else. The dog gives chase and quickly catches and kills the animal. The dog eats his kill. Eating the animal is essential for the survival of the dog.

In this story we can identify, what the psychologists call, the stimulus, response and reinforcement. The first stimulus to the dog is the noise made by the animal in the undergrowth. The warm body of the animal stimulates the dog’s sense of smell and seeing the animal running away stimulates the dog’s sense of sight.

So when that same dog experience similar stimuli again – the rustling, the odour and the movement of the animal – it is likely to respond in the same way. The dog chases the animal, catches it and eats it. Why does this happen? It happens, because it has been reinforced for its response in the past by eating its kill.

How does that transfer in to our life as a dog owner? If we stimulate the puppy to come to us when we call it, using the sound of our voice and movement of our hand. We reinforce the response by the puppy by giving it a piece of food. The puppy will quickly learn that coming to us on these signals is highly rewarding. In other words, the reinforcement will get the puppy into the habit of coming to us when we call it.

There are two types of reinforcement

Positive reinforcement
An example of this is giving the dog a piece of food after he has carried out what we wanted him to do.

Negative reinforcement
If a person jerks on the neck of the dog with a choke chain when the dog pulls on the lead on a walk. The slackening of the chain, when the dog does not pull, is negatively reinforcing to the dog. The dog does not do something, pull, and something unpleasant does not happen to him.

Dogs have many different things that acts as reinforcers, throwing a ball to chase, playing tug with the owner, going for a walk, chasing cars or digging holes to list just a few. The use of the primary reinforcer food is much more powerful than any of those listed as to the dog, food means survival. There are times when food may not be seen as such strong reinforcer by the dog, say after a meal when a little treat mean less to the dog than when he has not eaten anything since yesterday evening.

There are 5 important reasons the primary reinforcer should be used in training :