Category: Advanced Stuff, Performance Events ¤
  Author: Karen Pryor ¤
   Title: Chaining Behaviors, Building a Chain ¤

Karen's response to Helix Fairweather:

> Thinking of the unit as 3 makes much more sense. I
> can't wait to try it!

Great, I'm glad. Keep me posted.

> 
> Now I have to spend some time thinking about how to make the cue for the
> next unit a CR!

No you don't. It is automatic. When the animal understands the cue, and
will WAIT for the cue, then the cue is automatically a reinforcer, and
you can use it as such.

Think of the cue as a green light. If the animal is rushing into to
weavepoles before you give the cue, then it's not conditioned to the cue
yet. To establish a new cue like this one, you can actually put the dog
on a very brief sit, at the "entrance" to your unit, and then give the
cue, voice AND body english, to make it a very easy cue--and click the
behavior. 

Just do that a couple of times; then you can just make the dog wait,
perhaps by putting your hand in front of its nose, without the sit, and
then give the cue. You are shaping the behavior of "wait for the cue,
please" by using the cue as a reinforcer!

When the dog, though eager to do the behavior, voluntarily shows signs
of waiting for the cue, you've done the job. (Unless, of course, you
erase this by subsequently forgetting to use the cue, reinforcing many
runs without the cue, or correcting or punishing some other behavior
instead of giving the cue, etc.)

Now you can target through the next to last unit; you can click and
treat the first pass or partial pass, if you need to, that is, if the
animal seems uncertain that this is a Behavior. Remember, to you, the
two units are identical. To him, at this stage, they may be utterly
dissimilar. Anyway, when the animal takes the new unit with some
confidence--we are talking three or four reinforcements here, not
hundreds (you are going to travel through this as fast as possible, or
you risk building up superstitious behaviors), then you get him to go
through the first unit, and give your cue at the instant his shoulder
passes through the exit poles, and he'll do the last unit, and you click
and jackpot.

Don't WORRY about how to make the cue be a CR, cues are all potential
CRS. All you do have to do is to give the Cue at the same instant you
would have clicked, were you clicking.

Try it!

KP