Direct Association and Learning in Dogs

     Your dog doesn’t learn the way that you do. While this is a simple enough and readily accepted statement, truly understanding it will profoundly change how you interact with and teach your dog. Humans are capable of instrumental conditioning, where the outcome or consequence of a behavior will affect the likelihood of the behavior being repeated in the future. We clean our room and our parents praise or reward us. We miss curfew and are grounded. We do good work and get a raise or we drive too fast and get a speeding ticket. These outcomes reinforce or deter behaviors.
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     Your dog, on the other hand, forms direct associations. If the mind is focused on a stimulus and the dog experiences a sensation, then the dog will create a false causal link between the stimulus and the sensation. So, if your dog is walking with you on a leash, sees another dog, and the leash gets jerked on, then your dog will associate the discomfort of having its leash yanked with the presence of the other dog, instead of with its own behavior. If your dog toilets in the house and has its nose rubbed in it, then it will not associate the discomfort of the punishment with the act of having toileted, but rather, with the presence of the stool or urine and the handler. If your dog is in the act of toileting and the handler creates an unpleasant stimulus, then it can now build an association between the act of toileting and the unpleasant stimulus. If the dog sees a child and the humans in its environment become tense or negative, the dog can associate the presence of the child with the negative change in its environment and come to fear and distrust the child, thereby laying the groundwork for child reactivity.

   Therefore, it becomes important for handlers to ask themselves, “What is the sensation of seeing this dog, child, car, road, cat or stranger?” Your dog is capable of operant conditioning (a process of behavior modification in which a subject is encouraged to behave in a desired manner through positive or negative reinforcement, so that the subject comes to associate the pleasure or displeasure of the reinforcement with the behavior*),  but it is a much slower process than with humans. So while it is important for us to give the dog feedback and reinforcement of its behaviors, such as “don’t bark at that dog”, or “don’t jump on that child”, we must be constantly aware of which associations we are forming in the dog. To this end, corrections should be brief and at the lowest intensity needed to stop the behavior. As soon as the behavior is stopped, the handler should switch gears from correction to praise as quickly as possible and begin to “pad” the association by adding pleasant stimulus to the interaction.

     So, if you’re walking your dog and you see another dog, don’t shorten your leash or warn your dog against misbehavior. Instead, stay relaxed and positive right up to the moment that your dog misbehaves. Interrupt the behavior with a touch, movement, or sound (each dog will respond differently, so be sure to experiment to find out what is most effective for you and him/her) and then back your dog away from the other dog until it stops misbehaving. IMMEDIATELY begin to connect with, pet, praise, and even food reward your dog while maintaining the distance at which your dog stopped misbehaving. Continue with positive reinforcement for coexisting with the other dog until your dog relaxes and becomes pleasant and manageable, then move a couple steps closer to the other dog. Rinse and repeat until your dog is able to remain calm and pleasant at a reasonable proximity to the stress stimulus.
     
     Becoming aware of the effect of associative learning will have a pronounced effect on your relationship with your dog and its behavioral performance. Make sure that your dog has lots of opportunities to experience relaxed and fun socialization with other dogs, positive associations with you and the people in your life as well as things like leashes, vet offices, cars and any other stimuli that your dog experiences throughout its life. You will find that simply becoming “sensation aware” will ease much of the difficulty that we commonly experience when interacting with and training our four legged friends.