Rewards and reinforcers. Are they equal?

We all know that Positive Reinforcement is the welfare orientated way to train and work with dogs. Rewards function as reinforcers if they increase or maintain the frequency of a behaviour.

Positive reinforcement means adding something a dog enjoys immediately after a behaviour occurs maintains or increases the frequency of the behaviour (food, praise, play, toy, affection etc. depending on the individual dogs preference).

We also know that confrontational and coercive methods risk an aggressive or fear response (Herron, Schofer and Reisner 2009) and aversive techniques may affect the dog-carer relationship (Deldalle and Gaunet, 2014). These have NO place in animal training.

Gregory Berns’ trained 15 dogs to go in an fMRI machine to study the activation of the dogs’ brain in response to food or praise from their caregiver. They included a control condition of nothing happening. They found individual differences in the responses. Findings from this study suggest that there is consistent neurobiological orientation toward social and food reward within individual dogs, but the degree of preference is highly variable in individuals. We can carry out a preference test with our own dogs to find out what they find most rewarding and motivating.

Preferences, and the effectiveness of different rewards to function as reinforcers, are often assumed without proper scientific investigation. We often talk about using high value rewards or something extra special when trying to change an unwanted behaviour or to teach our dog to do something new.? Is it one of those things we saw on Facebook or in a blog post? Is there any evidence to demonstrate that high value treats work best?

One study by Riemer et.al.,2018 did investigate the influence of reward quality, quantity, and changes in reward value on motivation in domestic dogs. The findings (albeit from a low sample size), suggest that a food reward of higher quality represents a more effective reinforcer than a greater quantity of a less favoured food item.

The take home message from this post is

a) find out what really motivates your dogs and use high value rewards

b) don’t be stingy 😊

References:

Riemer, S. Ellis, S. Thompson, H. Burman. O. 2018. Reinforcer effectiveness in dogs—The influence of quantity and quality, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Volume 206, Pages 87-93, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2018.05.016.

Herron, M. E., Shofer, F. S., & Reisner, I. R. 2009. Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviours. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117(1), 47-54.