This page is part of the Fading portion of the Auxiliary Section of the
D.S. Dog Training Workshop, and an element of the Dog Science Network
Comprehensive Behavioral Conditioning for Dogs
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
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.