Brief Clicker Expo Notes

I went to ClickerExpo in January!

The whole experience was terrific, and I think I learned quite a bit. I got a few new ideas, but not many. But I do think I understand many of the things I’d previously read about it more fully and in a way that’s more actionable. Real-life examples are invaluable when it comes to updating all parts of my mind.

I jumped around between talks quite a bit, and when I wasn’t compelled by any of the speakers I went to the hands-on “learning lab” clicker sessions with dogs. 

This post is a bit shorter than I had originally intended. I realized that I wasn’t getting it written so I lowered my criteria :-).

Here are some rough notes:

• I was impressed with Karen Pryor as a speaker. I found her quite engaging–particularly her talk about how most scientists aren’t actually using the conditioned reinforcer properly. Yet another lesson in how crazy the world is, and in particular how messed up our scientific institutions are. Seems like things are slowly improving though in this area!
• I saw some fun videos about some dogs distinguishing between one, two, and three objects fluently.
• There was quite a bit about emotions. Everyone agreed that behaviors originally associated with angry, scared, or other upset emotions do not retain their original tone when captured with clicker training. In particular, the faculty noted that clicker training dogs to act ferocious didn’t work very well, and that this had been a challenge for people training dog actors for commercials. And there also seemed to be consensus that behaviors would acquire the emotional tone of the reinforcers used to train them. I updated that using multiple marker signals with different emotional tones was an excellent idea. (I’d heard of this idea before but hadn’t been compelled by it.)
• I both got some good heuristics for good shaping and a bunch of hours observing good shaping. I think I (and most amateur shapers) should raise criteria more slowly and take more breaks). It’s hard not to be impatient and overenthusiastic! One thing I hadn’t considered was that jumping ahead too quickly with criteria increases both the likelihood that garbage behaviors will get chained in and that the learner will then get stuck at a particular level.Variability is worth preserving.
• Verbal stimulus control is hard with dogs! Argos and I have been practicing since ClickerExpo to try to get him to listen to my actual words, but it was actually fairly heartening to see in the learning lab that many of the professional dog trainers hadn’t done any better with their dogs.
• Kathy Sdao gave a lecture on Premack’s principle that I found quite inspiring. It didn’t contain any entirely new information, but it was a very welcome refresher. I had heard the idea of reframing distractions as the best possible rewards for dogs, but I hadn’t actually thought of it that way for Lydia. I can tell I have a lot to learn about this whole clicker baby/toddler business, and I do think I’m slowly learning it.
• I also went to Kathy Sdao’s lab on cues. If anything, I was comforted that the professional trainers who had brought their dogs didn’t seem to have much better stimulus control than I have with Argos for verbal stuff. We’ve been working on that since I got back, but he’s still confused about sit vs. down, since he often goes down by sitting first, so it has historically worked well enough for him to guess. I’m trying to clean it up bit by bit.
• I had heard that Clicker Expo was an unusually positive and rewarding atmosphere. Makes sense. Not sure i would give the same review, but I think I’m implicitly comparing it to events I futurist-type events I usually go to that are usually full of my friends and people in my general demographic. I did get a few genuine compliments each day though, which was nice!
• I’m now part of a Clicker Parents Facebook group! I was going to start a list, but then I found out that already existed.

Since it’s been a few weeks now since I attended, I can confirm that it seems totally worthwhile that I went. It’s impossible to run controlled experiments with my n=1 parenting situation, but I can see that my relationship with Lydia has changed for the better in ways that seem directly attributable to stuff that I learned and internalized at Clicker Expo. That’s what I wanted! I’m now working on writing up the details of the changes I’ve made in perspective and how we do things.