I've recently been doing a bit of research and reading on teaching default type behaviours for arousal. Main reason being I've noticed that my BC who I do agility with has been getting more and more aroused at agility training, especially in more enclosed indoor type areas. Now arousal is good in one way. If he wasn't aroused I wouldn't get much sense out of him when I wanted to run him in agility. However when he's got to the point that he will bark often as he awaits his turn to run, is watching all the other dogs run a bit too intently for my liking and is so aroused that he isn't able to properly focus on doing tricks (that I originally used as a distraction to keep him busy) or focus; I think it's time to be doing some work on this. I can currently keep him focussed by constantly throwing food on to the floor for him to "find"; if I don't feed him at this rate he goes over threshold again and cannot focus. I've been reading the fantastic book, Control Unleashed by Leslie McDevitt, in which she suggests teaching placement cues and building value on a special mat or bed where the dog can lay for duration and remain in control of their arousal. I've been working on clicker training placement cues for the mat, which he has cracked now. The main criterion that I am yet to reinforce is serious duration. I've done a bit of research on methods and plans for clicker training and proofing more serious durations to a behaviour and the key concept that came up was the 300 peck method. I done some work already with this method to teach my BC loose lead walking and I recently wrote a short article on it, as much as anything to make sense of it for myself.
So here it is:
300 Peck Pigeon- the key to teaching duration and distance.
Hope the title got your attention! I expect you are thinking “I thought this was about training dogs?” Well it is. The 300 peck pigeon method is what many trainers will use to teach dogs to perform behaviours for serious durations and distances.
Ordinarily when we are clicker training a new behaviour that requires a moderate duration, we will only raise the duration criteria for a click and reward once the dog can perform the behaviour itself to a hand or verbal cue. To do so we simply click the dog for performing the behaviour for a second more and we repeat this a few times. Then we raise the criteria and ask for 2 or 3 seconds and reward and so on. This technique is similar in many ways to the 300 peck technique; however where they differ is that the 300 peck technique deals with long durations (and distances), meaning that by the end of the process a 300 peck trained behaviour may only need reinforcing after 10 minutes! Sounds cool doesn’t it?
The 300 peck method gets its name from an experiment in which a scientist was investigating how to build long duration variable schedules. She taught pigeons to peck a bar repeatedly hundreds of times (300 on average to be exact) before they were reinforced; meaning that the pigeons had a VR schedule of 300. So a VR schedule of 300 is impressive right, but how did she do it? The key to her success in teaching this behaviour was that she very gradually extended the number of pecks they had to give her before they were reinforced. You may wonder when we would want our dogs to perform behaviour for such a huge duration. The answer is, when you think about it, everyday! Take heelwork for example. You don’t want to have to be constantly reinforcing the dog after a couple of footsteps. Apart from anything else it means the dog doesn’t get any time to act like a dog. What you want is a dog that will happily walk on a loose lead by your side, taking in all the sights, sniffing and engaging with his surroundings (and you) in a relaxed controlled way. Similarly those of you who do any kind of competitive obedience work with your dog will have taught your dog to perform long duration and distance stays. Agility trainers will also teach their dogs a long distance and/or duration start line wait. These behaviours can both benefit from training with the 300 peck approach.
So how does it work? As I already mentioned the secret to creating duration and distance is to very slowly increase the time or distance before the dog is reinforced. According to the 300 peck method we do so in small steps of one until we reach 300. You may choose to count out loud if this helps you. To take for example loose lead walking; the only criteria we have for reinforcement is that the lead must be slack whilst we are counting for the dog to be clicked and treated. So in essence the dog can be sniffing, looking elsewhere or looking at you- that doesn’t matter. So long as the lead is slack when we reach our first “count” the dog can be reinforced. If then, the lead isn’t slack; we re-set our counter and start over again at 1. So the dog maintains a loose lead for 1 step on a walk- click, treat. The dog maintains a loose lead for 2 steps- click, treat. The dog maintains a loose lead for 3 steps- click, treat and so on until you reach 300.
Patience is the key with this method. At first you may have to reset the count several times before you can reach 10 steps but this isn’t a bad thing. Remember after all that clicker trained dogs learn just as much from withdrawal of the click as they do for constant reinforcement. The dog thinks “Oh… Why didn’t I get my click there?” and they’ll work on offering the right criteria. Once the dog grasps the idea of the 300 peck game you may be able to progress quicker.
Similarly with a 300 peck trained stay/wait behaviour you may choose to do this in seconds or steps. Depending on whether you are teaching a long distance/duration stay or just duration. For agility for example you ideally want the dog to wait on the start-line once you have set him up no matter where you put yourself on the course. You need distance so that, especially with fast dogs you can buy yourself time to be well ahead of him before he even starts; and duration so that he’ll wait and not break until you release him. When you are teaching this behaviour, impulse/ stimulus control comes into play especially if you are expecting the dog to wait for duration and distance in a high arousal environment (like a show). This is something I am working on with my dog, Dash (I’ll hopefully add some videos of our work on this at some point). You basically want a dog that’ll stay where you’ve asked him until released even if a bomb were to go off behind him! That’s what we want to aim for anyway (although on a practical note we definitely don’t want to be doing stays in minefields!). To teach this provided your dog can do a moderate distance wait/stay with low or no other environmental variables (distractions), in order to help the dog succeed at each stage, we keep the criteria low. If we are teaching the dog a combined long distance and duration stay this means we are only going to mark and reward one criteria type at a time (so perhaps duration first and then distance). So as with the loose lead walking, you will first click and reward the dog for 1 second. Then raise the criteria to 2 seconds, click and reward. Then 3 seconds, click and reward and so on until you reach 300. If the dog breaks at any point, you re-set the count and start back at 1. Once you have a dog that will stay for long durations you want to make sure you have properly proofed the duration criteria so that he will happily perform a long duration stay in the park, at home, in the garden, at your training field etc. Then you can start to 300 peck train the distance criteria in the same way as described above. One step away, click and treat. Two steps, click and treat. Three steps, click and treat and continue until you reach 300. If the dog slips up at any point, re-set the counter. And as with the duration criteria you can proof the distance criteria (separately initially) and then eventually (and only when the dog has reached a VR schedule of 300 in each) along with the duration criteria in a variety of settings and then add distractions. When you add distractions (i.e. a ball being thrown at a distance), you need to not only start with relatively low level distractions but also raise the distance and duration criteria for the click. It would be unrealistic and setting the dog up to fail for example if you asked the dog to stay and only waited to reinforce a VR schedule of 300. It ain’t gonna happen! Whenever you change one criterion/variable in training you need to keep the others constant or decrease them. So if you were to introduce a ball being rolled along the floor whilst the dog is asked to stay (assuming the dog is easily aroused by movement) you would need to lower the distance criteria to one step and the duration to a second for the dog to be clicked and then increase the criteria accordingly. When proofing distractions it is best to work on duration and distance separately and then combine once the dogs have really successful at both.
The 300 peck method is great for teaching really reliable distance and duration behaviours. Even if the process seems like a bit of a struggle at first, patience is the key. It’s a fantastic tool in the dog training toolkit!
Link to the original article:
So what I need to do is use the 300 peck method to add duration to the mat placement cue. As stated above, he'll only get clicked and reinforced for 1 second, then for 2 seconds, then for 3 seconds. If he moves from the mat I'll restart the counter. Once I've proofed duration, the plan would be to add distance and proof against distractions so that I can have him on his mat whilst I walk through a course at training, even if there are other dogs working at the other end of the arena. That's what we are aiming for anyway!
