Do As I Do: Using Social Learning to Train Dogs by Claudia Fugazza

Author:Claudia Fugazza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dogwise Publishing
Published: 2018-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

Do As I Do Phase Two: Generalizing the imitation rule

Before moving on to Phase Two, your dog should be replicating the first three behaviors that you chose to work on. Instead of waiting for the known cue attached to the behavior, the dog should now be reacting as soon as the “Do it!” cue is given.

Once the dog reaches a high success rate imitating three known behaviors immediately after being given the “Do it!” cue, it is time to take a step further and introduce three other known behaviors. While these behaviors are known by the dog, make sure you have not yet used them in the context of the Do As I Do protocol. Therefore, at this point of the training plan, you will be working with six different known behaviors, three of which were used in Phase 1 and three that were not but are familiar to the dog. The goal of this stage is for the dog to generalize the imitation rule to the three other known behaviors that you have not worked on yet in the Do As I Do context.

During this second stage the same rules that applied during the previous stage still prevail. As you will remember, the aim is to ensure that the dog makes a choice based solely on the demonstration performed by the human model without relying on prompts or other discriminative stimuli inadvertently provided. Hence, once more I remind you that it is good practice to record the training sessions in order to track any mistakes (e.g., providing any inadvertent signals to the dog) and correct them.

The critical point in your efforts to generalize the imitation rule is to pick one of the three behaviors you have not worked on yet. Remember in Phase One that you began by using the “Do it!” cue followed immediately after by the verbal cue already known by the dog. Now, instead of also using the known verbal cue, just use the “Do it!” cue. If the dog really understands that “Do it!” means to do what the handler has just done, then the dog has indeed generalized the imitation rule. If your dog comes across any difficulties in replicating any of those behaviors, you can resort to the old cue attached to that behavior after the “Do it!” signal, as we did at the beginning of the first stage of the protocol. Sometimes difficulties may arise due to the anatomic differences between humans and dogs. Thus the divergence in the way we carry out certain behaviors may make it harder for the dog to find the right match for the behavior demonstrated.

Changing human models

To further strengthen your dog’s ability to imitate successfully, I recommend at the end of this phase that you generalize the imitation rule using a different person to perform the demonstration and to give the “Do it!” command. In the research project mentioned early in the book, in order to verify Philip’s imitation skills, researchers substituted the regular trainer with other human models.

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