Everything about dog training applies to our own behavior and learning. I have a human story for you about the results of a big change in routine.
My husband is a pretty good dog trainer. He’s been around behavior science for over 30 years. He has spent quality time with Dr. Bob Bailey, Sue Ailsby, Susan Garrett, and many other highly accomplished trainers and behaviorists. He’s been infused with the science pretty thoroughly.
I am, for the most part, the “kitchen witch” at our house, although my husband is also a good cook and knows his way around a kitchen. I do most of the cooking, I like to bake, and I am the primary cleaner in that room: dishes, countertops, clearing away clutter. I am highly aware of conditions, situations, and what I am learning through the systems that are set up to make kitchen use efficient.
Our Dishwashing Routine
An example system is that we place the dirty dishes at the left of the sink. We wash in the left sink and the dishes go into the dish drain in the right sink to dry. We’ve been doing this the same way, in the same house, for over 30 years.
My Routine
When I put dishes away, either after they’ve dried on their own or if I dry them individually with a towel, I pick one up, dry it, and put it away. There are times when I’ll place a few similar items on the counter below the cabinet where they belong, before putting them up on the higher shelves as a group.
Derek’s Routine
When my husband puts dishes away, he has a more random approach that I have been following so I can learn it. I need to learn it because he often walks away from the job before the last 1-3 dishes are put away. He’s a high-energy guy! LOL
He sets clean, dry dishes down on the right of the sink. This seems like a decent plan, since we sometimes lay a towel on the counter in that area when we have a lot of dishes, to stack the overflow for drying. However, he also often puts a dirty dish there if he’s been fixing a plate of food on that side of the kitchen and forgets to move it to the dirty-dish area on the left of the sink. Are you starting to get the picture?
Communication Goes Beyond Speaking
So much of the communication between a seasoned couple like ourselves is non-verbal. I don’t think anyone wants to spend a lot of time talking about where we left dishes, or other mundane things. We want to talk about dreams, plans, the state of the world, and ideas for the future. We depend on the systems in place to drive our behavior regarding dishes, laundry, cleaning the bathroom, etc. There’s no reason to re-invent the wheel, as my friend Krista taught me years ago. Follow routines and save your brain power for creating new things to benefit yourself and others.
Learning Through Conversation
For a very long time, I routinely asked my husband about each dish I found sitting at the right of the sink – every time – because I genuinely was not sure whether that dish was dirty or clean in many cases. After gathering what I thought was enough information, I began to count on those dishes to be clean. It seemed that almost every time, he answered that they were. What I had learned seemed to be working.
Changes in Routines
This morning, I encountered a new set of conditions. He had just finished preparing breakfast for the dogs and cats and I was starting to wash dishes. I saw that a large container that had held raw meat patties for the dogs was on the left side, the dirty-dish side, and the lid of that container was on the right. At first, seeing the lid to the right told me it was clean, but when I saw its matching container at the left, my mind went a little wacky. I pondered the possibilities and finally shared with him what was going on in my brain.
“Since the container is over here and the lid is over there, I can’t figure out this puzzle,” I said. He told me the lid was dirty. My brain exploded. It was an emotional response. I was stymied. The system I had learned was incorrect and I didn’t know what to do about it. My husband and I talked about behavior science and how changes in our behavior affect our dogs’ and cats’ learning, every single day.
Systems and Stimulus Pictures
My husband and I can easily sort through the problem with dirty and clean dishes, but dogs and cats can’t. We humans can use spoken and written language as well as body language. We have the ability to create complex systems and flow charts to understand those systems. When our systems fail, we can put them back together again. Dogs and cats rely on the immediate set of stimuli available to them; they can’t use a flow chart. So, when something in their stimulus picture changes, their brain explodes and they truly don’t know what to do unless they have been specifically trained in enough different conditions that they have generalized the skills.
How Routines Help
Routines are important for dogs and cats because like us, they have lots of other things going on in their brains. If they have to make a new decision every time they eat, relieve themselves, take a nap, go to bed at night, or when they hear you make a sound that may or may not sound exactly the same as it did the last time you made it, they will make errors. If the routine is kept impeccably consistent, they don’t have to make a decision; the stimulus they see, hear, smell, or feel causes the behavior they display. It happens so quickly, you might miss it if you blink.
You Have Many Routines
What routine, fluent behaviors do you have? I wash dishes that are to the left of the sink. I also close doors and gates that I had to open to go through. (Many people who have dogs do this consistently!) I hold my fork in my right hand when I eat. (How would it change my eating behavior and emotional state if my right hand was tied behind my back?) I use all my fingers to type on a QWERTY keyboard; what if the keys on my keyboard were rearranged?!
Your Learners Depend on You
Your dogs and cats depend on the clues they get from their environment to make the choices you want them to make. You can change the environment and teach them a new system, but if you make a drastic change all at once they will be confused. They will make a mistake. If you don’t recognize what environmental clues you respond to and what clues you are giving your learners, you won’t know why they made that mistake. So many times, the error is not that of the learner; it was in the way the teacher arranged the environment.
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