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The Dog Decides

“The dog decides what is reinforcing.” Positive reinforcement trainers frequently say that to their human students.  What they mean is that people can easily be mistaken about whether something constitutes reinforcement. For instance, we may think praising or petting...

Look at the Whole Dog

In a class I’m teaching on dog communication, we recently discussed a study on how well people interpret dog body language. The study, Description of the behaviour of domestic dog by experienced and inexperienced people, was published in Applied...

The “Choice” Challenge

Thanks to Debbie Jacobs and Randi Rossman for their input on this topic. Any weird conclusions are mine alone. I have come to believe that most of us who thought we were using “choice” as a reinforcer were mistaken. Wait! …