I have mentioned reinforcement history a few times in blog posts of the past. This is a topic I love to revisit every once in a while because it can have a huge impact on your training success with your pet. As I have mentioned in previous posts, reinforcement history is your dog's history of receiving a reinforcer in reference to a behavior, experience, object, or person. But what does this actually mean for the dog, handler, and the training process? To help you better understand this concept of reinforcement history and why it is so important, let’s take a look at one of my favorite analogies, the bank account analogy.
The Reinforcement Bank Account
As you might know from reading other posts about dog training, reinforcement history is something that dogs develop over time. That is why it is called reinforcement "history". The more reinforcement the dog receives in reference to something, the more it will be conditioned to see that thing has having a high chance of producing desirable outcomes. Why is this important? One of my favorite ways to explain this is with what many positive reinforcement trainers call the "reinforcement bank account".
How is reinforcement history like a bank account? Each time you reinforce your dog in connection with something such as a behavior, you are making a deposit into your bank account that you have opened in your dog's proverbial bank. However, each time your dog experiences an unpleasant experience or outcome in reference to what you reinforced it for in the past, you are making a withdrawal.
Just like with a personal bank account, the idea is to be putting more in than you take out to prevent debt and having a card declined. With dogs, the more reinforcement in the bank, the less it will impact your dog's willingness to participate in a withdrawal (a moment where you have to ask them to do something they dislike such as take a bath or come when called). And if you have enough reinforcement in the bank, your dog's willingness to participate might not even be impacted in those occasional moments when you must make a withdrawal and have no reinforcement available in the moment. For example, if you have a long reinforcement history with your dog in reference to recall (usually the "come" cue/behavior), you have increased your chances of your dog being willing to participate and come when called in moments where reinforcement is not readily available, or the dog has to leave something it really wants.
You Must Have Good Credit
Something very important to keep in mind about this analogy of the reinforcement bank account is that you must have good credit. If your dog learns that you are unreliable or take out more than you put in on a regular basis, it may decline your card so to speak and begin to look for better options or even eventually close the account. This is important because whether we are using this analogy or not, this is how dogs work. Your dog may still love you, but will it respond to you when it sees a squirrel in the yard? So many dogs seem to ignore people when asked to do things the dog dislikes, yet others may pay attention but avoid doing what they have been asked. Some may have never really learned what the behavior is called by the person. But many dogs deal with over drafted accounts. If your dog ignores you when you call it in from the yard, your dog might have either found something that adds more reinforcement to the account than you do, or it has closed your account in reference to recall due to a history of overdrafts.
It is also important that we are not making massive withdrawals as this will raise some red flags, specifically emotional flags. If you teach your dog that you will reinforce it for getting into the car, then suddenly take it through the carwash without having ever introduced your dog to the carwash, your dog might decide that too much was taken out of the bank account connected to car rides and may no longer want to enter a car at all.
Be A Caring Card Holder
Now that we have a little bit better understanding of how reinforcement history can impact dogs, we need to add some emotion and empathy to this analogy. Bank accounts are things that we humans don't always treat very well. We might make withdrawals too often or try taking too much out at once, both of which don't work well in the dog world. So, take this bank account analogy and look at your dog not as a bank, but as a dog. The concept here as that your dog must be able to rely on you and know that you will add good things to the situations in a way that will help it learn. Occasional bad experiences will always happen. That is life. But the more your dog learns that good things are highly likely to happen when you are working with it or asking it to do things, interact with things, or meet people, the more it will be willing to accept an occasional or necessary hard request or accidental, scary mishap. We humans need to treat our dogs well. We need to be wise in how we use the reinforcement we give and when and how we ask them to do hard things. This is not to say that we cannot challenge our dogs. We should! But we need to make sure that we are doing it in a manner that shows the animal that we are worthy companions who will add to their life in a good way. We have more to work with when our dogs know that we will fill their lives with good things. This does not always have to be food. Reinforcement can come from many sources. The point is that our dogs need to see that we are not just taking from them all the time. We need to have a history of giving, a long history of giving. We need to give more than we take, as our dogs so often do for us.
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