What the heck is a marker?
Many of you have heard of something called clicker training but may be less familiar with its underlying premise of using a marker so I thought I’d focus this week’s blog on this handy tool.
Did you know that we have mere seconds to deliver a reward for our learner dog to be able to make the association, “it’s this behavior” that resulted in the reward. I don't know about you and how fast you are at observing a behavior and being able to get your food reinforcement delivered in a matter of a couple seconds after the target behavior is performed. How many of you start by saying “oh Freddy you are such a good dog”, fumble around for the biscuit in your pocket and maybe a minute or more have gone by by the time you’ve rewarded the behavior. Sometimes during this delay maybe your dog has gone off to sniff a bush or done a behavior that you really were not intending to reinforce. You can see how it might be confusing to the dog, as your dog tries to figure out –did I get I a reward for looking at the human, for sniffing a bush, or maybe it was peeing on the special plant. I continue to be amazed how dogs somehow figure out what the target behavior was and repeat it in order to earn the reward, almost despite our actions.
A marker is simply a tool to more succinctly communicate, bullseye that's the behavior I wanted and based on our contract, your payment is coming. Now the extra seconds or minutes delay don't clutter the process of associating performing X behavior; the marker denotes pretty immediately which behavior results in reinforcement and assuming the reward was in fact reinforcing to the learner, the dog will more likely repeat performing that behavior to get another reward. Dogs are typically opportunistic, they will do things that result in good things.
As a tool, a marker can be, for example, a clicker device, a whistle, a sound the human makes, or a flash of a light if your learner has hearing limitations. The tool should be something easy for the teacher to implement and be something neutral or not aversive to the learner. Some dogs shy away hearing a sharp clicker sound or beep.
If we are interested in using a marker, we need to first lay out the contract, marker = reinforcement will be coming. This can quickly be accomplished by giving or saying your marker, then immediately reward; do this 10 times in a row and just like Pavlov, your dog learner hears (or sees) the marker and will be expectantly waiting for reinforcement to happen. It's critical to be consistent with implementing the contract, eg if you happen to click the wrong behavior, whoops you still need to follow through with your end of the contact and provide reinforcement. Just be more careful next time and mark the desired target behavior and reward.
If you choose to use a verbal marker it helps to make it unique rather than e.g. a word you commonly use. I use a common word “Yes” but say it higher pitched and sort of staccato like so it doesn't sound like a yes I may say when I'm having a regular conversation. I've seen dogs look at the human who is conversing and you can tell by the dog’s behavior they are thinking, “wait a minute I just heard you say the marker so where's my reward?”
I find using a marker helps better delineate with greater precision to my learner dog what behavior I'm wanting to reinforce so it kind of takes out the sloppiness that comes from your dog guessing or trying to best guess, “wasn't it the eye contact, bush sniffing or peeing on a particular plant that my human wants me to do”?
Cheers, Tracy
