Dialogue not Distraction: How and When to Use a Synchronous Schedule - Training #7

At Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, we too strive to advance intentional and enlightened behavior strategies to improve the lives of the animals in our care. We do this creating a training dialogue with them. By dialogue, we mean 2-way communication in which both trainers and learners use their behavior to dynamically influence one another, including the rate of reinforcement. This approach as resulted in reliable participation in particularly long and/or sometimes uncomfortable husbandry and medical procedures such as voluntary stem cell treatments, blood collection/banking, ultrasounds, and curative hoof care. Given the dynamic nature of the rate of reinforcement that results from this dialogue, the typical textbook definitions of simple reinforcement schedules (continuous, intermittent, variable duration) appear to fall short. This approach may also give the impression that we are simply distracting our learners with a deluge of free food. However, that description also falls short of the mark as it misses the subtle changes in animals’ behavior that communicate the benefit of increasing or decreasing the rate of reinforcement delivered by the trainer, moment by moment. In this paper, we will describe this strategy from the ground up, starting with how we train each component skill in the targeted chain of behaviors with a clear ABC contingency on a continuous reinforcement schedule. Once the chain of behaviors is mastered with fluency, we move to a Dynamic Reinforcement Strategy in order to accomplish the otherwise difficult behavioral goals.