Schedules of Reinforcement, “Baked In” Behaviors & How Dog Training Can Help You Take The MCAT

A listener who is studying for the MCAT exam wrote in to ask if there were any dog training scenarios that could help illustrate some of the terms she needed to know for the psychology section of the exam. Annie, who has learned most of what she knows about dog training from working with dogs rather than from studying terms or taking exams, does her best to help make some "science-y" concepts more understandable through the lens of dog training and human behavior as we experience in everyday life. She talks about schedules of reinforcement, learned behaviors vs preinstalled behaviors, learning by observation and more. Mentioned in this episode: Excel-Erated Learning: Explaining In Plain English How Dogs Learn And How Best To Teach Them, by Pamela J. Reid https://amzn.to/3fN3RfW Don't Shoot The Dog by Karen Pryor https://amzn.to/2Mugnpc Behavior Principles in Everyday Life by John D. Baldwin and Janice I. Baldwin https://amzn.to/30jJxNH Bobo Doll Experiment https://www.britannica.com/event/Bobo-doll-experiment --- Partial Transcript: Annie: Hello, human friends, Annie here. As I've mentioned before, I've been recording mostly in my neighbor's apartment while he's out of town so that I can escape the craziness of my apartment, but he doesn't have air conditioning. So I couldn't deal with sitting in his apartment to record today. So I came back to my apartment to record after sweating profusely while trying to record down there. And then I realized you can't really have the air conditioning on anyway when you're recording a podcast because of the background noise, which made me think about all the sweaty podcasters working from home right now. So I blast the AC really, really high, just long enough to try and cool down the room while I record. So anyway, Hi! I wanted to respond to an interesting question. I got from a listener who has been in touch with me, uh, before Supriya is, uh, her name. I might be saying it wrong. Supriya. Such a pretty name that sounds like surprise. She wrote: “ Hey Annie, I am currently studying for the psychology section of the MCAT, and while I've never heard of many things in this section before I am totally nailing the section on classical and operant conditioning, because I've been listening to your podcast for a while now. I was wondering if you happen to have time before my exam in September, would you be able to expand on operant conditioning in terms of dog training, which is what makes sense to me. Specifically, I'm studying reinforcement schedules, innate versus learned behaviors, escape and avoidance learning, the Bobo doll experiment and associative versus non associative learning. Then there's also biological constraints on learning, which I'm studying specifically for humans. But I'm curious about this in dogs too. Of course, if you don't have time, this is completely okay. Just thought I would ask considering I've learned so much from you already .” Isn't that a nice email to get, isn’t that a cool email to get? First of all, just wanted to say that I'm flattered that you feel that you've learned so much. And I'm amazed that anybody is asking me for MCAT advice... Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe