Animal trainers often talk about first teaching a behavior and then later adding a cue for that behavior. However, while your animal is learning a behavior, your animal is also learning environmental cues, even if you are not aware of them. Behaviors and cues evolve together. When you return to working in this setting or with these props, your animal will be ready to do this behavior again. So, if you try to teach a new behavior under these same conditions, the learning will be slow. This is because the cues for the original behavior will interfere with the acquisition of the new behavior. Instead, you can speed up learning by changing the environmental cues. This presentation will explain how these cues evolve. Then, we’ll look at several case studies and explore how you can use this knowledge to speed up learning.
About the Speaker
Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Behavior Analysis at the University of North Texas. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1995 under the direction of Dr. Donald M. Baer. During his graduate training, he also worked closely with Dr. Ogden R. Lindsley. Dr. Rosales-Ruiz’s areas of interest include antecedent control of behavior, generalization, behavioral cusps, fluency-based teaching, treatment of autism, teaching of academic behavior, animal training, rule-governed behavior, and contingency-shaped behavior. He has served on several editorial boards, including the Journal of Precision Teaching, the European Journal of Behavior Analysis, and the International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy. Dr. Rosales-Ruiz is a fellow of the Eastern Psychological Association and a trustee of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies.
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