This page is part of the Auxiliary section of the Beginner's Course of the
D.S. Dog Training Workshop, - an element of the Dog Science Network
The Six Forms of Fading You Can Use When Training Your Dog
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- Fading out the reinforcement
When you are teaching your dog to do something new, like teaching him to obey a new command, he will progress much more quickly if you reward him every time he gets it right, or comes somewhat close to getting it right. Rewarding your dog every time he gets it right, which is called continuous reinforcement, is by far the best way to see to it that a new response quickly becomes well established.However, after your dog has a new response thoroughly nailed down, you should gradually begin removing your reinforcers by rewarding the correct execution of that response less and less often over time. Therefore, after your dog has become proficient at performing a given response, you will want to slowly begin reinforcing the performance of that response less and less often.
Systematically withdrawing your reinforcement for a particular response after it has become established is called fading the reinforcement.
After a response is established, it is essential that you back away from your previous schedule of continuous reinforcement in gradual fashion. In fact, is imperative that it be done so slowly that your dog will not even realize that he is being weaned from a continuous schedule.
If your dog stops making the target response at some point, then clearly, your schedule of withdrawal was too ambitious. If that happens, go back to reinforcing every instance of the target behavior until it is once again well established. Then, next time, take care to fade out your reinforcement more slowly.
But remember, you should always reinforce a good healthy percentage of everything that your dog does right. You just need to back away from a schedule of continuous reinforcement for every response, because there just isn't enough time in the day or energy in the universe to allow a person to reinforce every desirable response their dog ever makes.
Besides, fading the reinforcement has been proven to make any given response more resilient. And the fact that more established responses are no longer reinforced continuously serves to make the new responses he is learning, that are currently being reinforced continuously, extra special in the mind of your dog.
Part of fading your reinforcement for an established response should include rewarding that response less often with edible reinforcers, since for the most part, you will want to reserve those for newer responses that you are still in the process of shaping into existence.
- Fading your verbal cues by sound volume
- Fading your verbal cues by the number of words
- Fading your tactile cues
The term tactile cues refers to anything you do, using your sense of touch, to control or communicate with your dog.When you are first teaching your dog to obey commands, after issuing him a given command, you will need to put your hands on the animal and guide him with such thoroughness that there is no possibility that he will able to perform that command incorrectly. Then, as he gets better and better and more and more reliable at executing any given command, you should begin to give him less and less physical guidance. However, the physical prompts must be maintained to whatever extent is needed to ensure that the dog's response to the command remains flawless.
For more info on fading your tactile cues see page four of the command training section
- Fading more challenging stimuli into your dog's training environment
When you first start working with your dog on any given command, you will want to conduct your training sessions in a place that is free from distraction of any kind.
However, after your dog is able to execute a particular command perfectly, you should begin to gradually introduce little potential distracters into his training environment.
Just be sure that you do not overwhelm your novice trainee by introducing distractions that are too intense or too numerous, too early in the game.
If you bring something into your dog's training environment that has the potential to distract him, and in fact, it does distract him from his training, then, you'll know that you introduced a distracter that was too intense, and/or you introduced the damn thing too soon, before he had a chance to build up his resistance.
The trick is to inoculate your canine novice trainee to distraction by gradually exposing him to more and more of it over time. However, your goal should be to introduce those extraneous factors so gradually that none of those potential distracters ever actually do succeed in distracting the animal. - Fading your dog into more challenging training environments
In the section immediately above, you read a description of how potential distracters can be introduced into your dog's training environment, in order to inoculate him against distraction.
The inverse of gradually changing the stimuli in your dogs training environment can be achieved in a progressive and incremental fashion, by slowly and gradually changing the environment in which you train your dog.
For example, you may first teach your dog some particular command in the den, where the two of you are the only living things in sight. Once he masters the task in that distraction-free environment, you could then take him into the living room and work with him until he masters that same command with a couple relatives sitting quietly in the corner. When he has mastered the execution of the command in the living room, then, take and train him in the playroom where things are rowdier. Then, when he has mastered the distractions there, drill him on the command out in the backyard where children are splashing wildly in the nearby pool.
The idea is to train your dog in settings in which, over time, each new environment is successively and incrementally more distracting, until you have a dog that has learned to stay calm, attentive, and focused on your instructions, even when all hell is breaking loose around you.
Even though we have listed it here at the bottom of the page on fading, in truth, when you process your dog through training environments that are successively more distracting, that is actually considered to be a form of shaping.
At the risk of splitting semantic hairs, the rule is as follows:
When you condition your subject's behavior by systematically and progressively introducing more challenging stimuli into his environment over time, you are using a fading procedure.
When you condition your subject's behavior by systematically processing him through a sequence of progressively more challenging environments, you are using shaping.
Hence, fading and shaping are the inverse of one another.
Sandwich cues and other verbal prompts are used to help get new responses established. However, after the new behavior is in place, in order to save you from a fate in which you have to endlessly repeat the words in order to keep your dog towing the line, the cues need to be removed.
Verbal cues need to be faded out gradually, over time, lest the behavior they support collapse due to their sudden withdrawal.
One of your two alternatives for gradually eliminating your verbal cues is to fade them out gradually by speaking the words more and more softly over time until over a period of weeks, until eventually, you are only mouthing the syllables before you finally quit speaking them altogether.
You can also fade out your sandwich cues and other verbal prompts simply by saying the words less often. For example, over the period of a month, you can go from reassuring your dog ten-times-a-minute to eight, then to six, then to four and so on, until at the end of the month, a reassuring sandwich cue becomes only an occasional thing.