You Get What You Click: Looking at the bigger picture.

 

This was originally posted to clickryder in response to a question about how to decide what to click and what to work on. The person who posed the question had a mare who was a quick learner but also impatient.

 

Hi Jill,

I think I will stick by my earlier suggestions of working on head down and mat work because these are two exercises that are both calming and good for working on duration, and that sounds like what Zuni needs.

When I am training a horse I try to be very aware of their mental state and choose exercises that will help them maintain an appropriate level of interest and eagerness without getting too excited. The easiest way to do this is to alternate exercises that get the horse excited with calming ones. This is similar to the good strategy of training both sides of each behavior (if you train head down, train head up too), but I think of it more as training exercises that help you balance energy.

In addition, you can help balance your horse's energy by adding duration to many exercises which can promote calmness, so it doesn't mean you are stuck forever with alternating between head down and other things.

In your specific case, it sounds like you have given her a really good start and she is catching on and eager to play. That is great, now you just have to get to the next stage which is where she is eager to play but understands that she has many opportunities for reward and she doesn't have to be so excited about things.

I have done a lot of thinking this fall about clicking while riding and how to take advantage of the power of the clicker without getting myself in trouble (which I have done, but luckily clicked my way out of it - phew!).

One of the things I realized is that when I click a horse, I am clicking for one of three things: a change in response to a cue, duration, or an offered behavior. This is oversimplified, but you will get the idea. How much I click for each of these (compared to the others) affects the kind of horse I will end up riding. There is no right answer here. It is a matter of personal preference, and might vary from horse to horse, even for the same rider/trainer. With my two riding horses, one is higher energy than the other so I choose different exercises for him and I also structure my lesson so that I am clicking for different reasons.

I am wondering if this way of looking at how to choose clickable moments would be helpful to others, especially new clicker trainers, so I will throw my ideas out here and you can use them if they are useful...

I think that when you start out clicker training, it seems so simple. You click for what you like and build from there. And that works, but once you are beyond basic work (and with some horses, even within the basic work), there are layers of complexity and it is important to be aware that you are influencing your horse's behavior not just by what you click at each individual moment, but by what aspect of the behaviors you are working on and the general pattern of things you click.

So, for example, if you click a lot for offered behavior, you will get a very eager horse that does lots of wonderful things, but maybe not on cue. Or maybe your horse will end up using visual aids for cues (such as a concrete object (mat, ball, cone..) . This is great if you want to do a lot of free shaping or tricks or you want to have a creative horse. I have to confess that I love offered behaviors and I think while most of us might say that we want behaviors on cue, the line between asking for something and having it offered is not always clear. And most of us have default.html behaviors, so even though we might think most of our training is under stimulus control, there are still parts that are not.

If you click a lot for changes, you will end up with a horse that has a large repertoire but is quick to move on to trying something new, and you will probably find it difficult to get duration. I think everyone goes through this stage because you have to get any new behavior started before you go for duration. But I think that if you get too caught up in the details of improving the quality and clicking for every improved effort without adding a little duration, the horse doesn't get the message that sometimes they just need to do the right thing a little longer. You can use clicking for changes to build duration but only if you don't click every effort.

If you click for duration, you will get a steadier horse but one that might be less quick to catch on when you want to add the next level of refinement to the current behavior. They might also have spent more time practicing the behavior in a less polished form. But we need duration. If you don't have duration, then you don't see enough variation to know what your horse can do. One of my common errors is to stay with clicking each and every effort. I might make the horse do it a little longer before clicking because I am waiting for a specific detail, but I don't tend to stop the horse and restart. I guess this is more true for some types of exercises than others but I think it is important to praise the horse for trying and ask again before the horse gets in the habit of being rewarded for each effort. You don’t want the horse to get frustrated, but you do want the horse to become persistent about continuing to try.

This leads to one way to build duration which is to just decide not to click every effort. So you might click randomly for head down until the horse starts to show that she is thinking a little more. I find that when I start head down, the horse is in such a yo-yo phase that sometimes there is no significant difference between tries. So as soon as I am reasonably sure the horse will offer some form of the behavior, I start clicking less often. Sometimes I just randomly omit a click here and there and see how the horse responds. I say randomly although I am, of course, watching the horse's body language and trying to click the better efforts, but I am not worried about it. If I miss a click, I just ask again and sometimes I let the horse put her head back up and ask again so that I can show her that head down is still the right answer. I also like to click if I can see the horse change her mind by starting to put her head up and then dropping it again. In this case, I don't wait for duration on that effort, but click her for thinking and decided to put her head back down without me asking again.

Another way to teach duration is to just extend the amount of time/steps before you click. Or you can click and allow the horse to eat while continuing the movement. So, you mentioned clicking Zuni and feeding her low. This is a great way to build duration in head down because the horse figures out there is really no point in putting her head up.

Well, I think I am rambling a bit here and it is getting late. I hope this makes some sense. I guess what I am suggesting is that you work on getting Zuni to do head down for longer periods and use head down to have her settle when she gets excited about other exercises. I think that some of the initial excitement is often just because the horses can't believe we are playing this great new game and they chill out a bit once they realize we are going to keep playing. But, in the meantime, if you are working on targeting and she gets grabby or upset, just have her put her head down for a minute.

...I would add to this that I didn't include captured behavior in my list of possible things to click.  I tend to think of capturing a behavior as capturing a complete behavior instead of the beginning piece. For example, I did capture the behavior of lying down with my mini. I clicked for the final laydown instead of the steps leading up to it. My mini was not offering to lie down because he thought I wanted it. He was just lying down and when I clicked it, he thought "wow, what did I just do?" In that sense it is different from an offered behavior. But since I don't find myself capturing complete behaviors very often I didn't include them in my list of reasons to click.


Katie Bartlett,  February 1, 2005