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First Responses - also known as New Responses or New Behavior
When we say that your dog is making a new response, the word new refers to the fact that he has never done that particular thing before, at least not in that setting and under that specific circumstance. Thus, he is making that response for the first time, which is why a new response is also referred to as a first response.
Any given response could, conceivably, simultaneously be a first response in several different ways. For example, even though your newly arrived puppy has peed before, as he squats to shower your rug with urine, he has never before urinated:
- on a rug
- in your living room
- in your house
- with you watching
- without his mother and siblings around
Therefore, in this case we would say that there are at least five levels of newness to your dog's response, even though, in this case, the response itself (urination), is not completely new.
The greater the newness quotient endemic to the response, the greater will be the capacity of the subject to be influenced in the future by the consequences of that response, as newness lends power to the outcome of any given behavior. To be sure, one's capacity to be molded will be strongly influenced by the newness quotient, which may be why, in all of behavioral science, there is perhaps no more powerful determinant of future behavior than the consequence of a new response made in new surroundings in a new social setting during the critical stage of development.
On the Fragility of First Responses
New responses are extremely fragile, which means that when any given behavior is brand new, at that point, it will be the easiest that it is ever going to be to bring it to a permanent halt. Therefore, if you punish your dog the very first time he displays a new response, there is an excellent possibility that he will never emit that response ever again, throughout the entirity of his life. That is especially true of first responses emitted by your dog during his critical stage of development.
Permenently suppressing undesirable behavior by dispensing punishment during a first response or at some other critical moment of your dog's development is known as strategic or tactical punishment.