A while ago, I shared on my Patreon that I kept going the wrong way because there were SO many corridors in the apartment building I’m staying at, and all the corridors look exactly the same. By now, I’ve figured it out, and 95% of the time, I pick the right corridor right away.
Something new has crept up though! There’s an elevator here. As I got used to taking the elevator, I stopped paying attention to the elevator buttons. (When you first take elevators in new buildings, you stop and think before you push the button: what floor do you want to go? What button do you need to push? For a couple seconds, your full attention is on the buttons, and you pick the correct one because it’s a conscious task you put effort towards.)
By now, I’ve taken the elevator so many times that I don’t shift into attention-to-the-buttons mode anymore. I just continue daydreaming or thinking about whathever it was I was thinking before I got on the elevator. I expect my finger to unthinkingly push the right button. Riding the elevator has become a habit, and I seem to unconsciously expect that so has pushing the button. Only that second part? Not true! Ever since moving the button-task to the habit-part of my brain, I push the wrong button … pretty much every second time I go up. So far, I believe I’ve gotten it right every time going down; probably because the down button is the very first one, which makes it obvious. The up button I need is in between many other up buttons. I need to push 4, but I’ve pushed 3 a lot, and just now, I pushed 2. I usually recognize the errors of my ways when the button I pushed lights up. It snaps me out of daydreaming. My mind then actually focuses on the task, I push the right button and the “close the doors” button when we reach the floor I accidentally pushed.
When riding elevators, what makes us fluent in the “right” behavior is habit: we push the correct button consciously until we do it unconsciously. I’m pretty sure for a lot of people, the transition is seamless. For me, in this building anyways, it hasn’t been. The task has shifted to the unconscious bucket before it was ready, so I keep making the “mistake” of pushing the “wrong” button about 50% of the time when I go up. That’s a lot of “mistakes!” I put the word “mistakes” in quotes because … nothing bad happens. I lose 2 seconds of time or so, but that’s it. It’s not a “punishing” consequence; it’s a consequence I don’t mind. So the consequence of the doors opening on the wrong floor first isn’t likely to teach me anything.
I think if someone put a sticky note on “my” (the “right”) button for going upwards, or lit this button before I pushed it, my success rate would be close to 100%. Even without thinking about it. Because just like going down, it would be obvious. And if the button stayed obvious for another … I don’t know, 50 reps, which equals 16.666 days, they could then remove the sticky note or the light and I’d probably be able to unconsciously select the “right” button due to the habit having had more time to form without me making “mistakes.”
Do I care about getting it right the first time? No. It doesn’t matter to me. So I’m good; I don’t need anyone to help me out with sticky notes. I just find it interesting to think about. I suspect that even without the sticky notes, if I kept riding this elevator for a few more months, I would end up getting it right—unconsciously—every single time. I won’t be able to confirm this because I won’t stay here long enough, but I believe that learning is going to happen; it’ll just take more time because I’m free to make mistakes, and the only consequence is a lack of reward (getting to the right floor is a low-value reward most times; the doors opening on the wrong floor slows me down and I don’t care; it is simply the absence of a reward.) Habit will develop, but it will take longer than if the “correct” button stood out to me more.
This is of course a dog training metaphor. And I fully believe that other learners would not need a post-it note or a lit-up button to learn faster. Other learners may already have learned what I didn’t learn. Other learners yet may perceive the doors opening on the wrong floor more saliently than I do, and also learn faster. Different beings have different learning styles, and different experiences matter to different beings.
For a learner like me, what would be the fastest (which isn’t automatically the “best”; it depends on the task at hand what is best!) way of teaching/learnign to push the “right” button going up? Note that when it comes to me riding elevators, learning speed doesn’t matter at all, making this purely a thought experiment. I believe for the learner I am, if you wanted to maximize the learning speed in the elevator scenario, you’d have to implement a consequence I’d prefer to avoid every time I pushed the “wrong” up button. The consequence would have to be delivered either immediately, or someone needed to mark it.
Remember I need to push “4” to get it right. So if I pushed “3,” there should either be a beep (a “punishment marker”) and then, when I got to floor 3 and the doors opened, the consequence would be implemented (say, that floor was filled with several inches of water and it flooded the elevator the moment the doors opened, so my shoes and socks would get wet. Or floor #3 was on fire, so when the doors opened, I’d have to work to keep my dogs’ noses away from the open doors so they didn’t get singed, and I’d feel an uncomfortable heat wave pushing into the elevator. Or there’d have to be very loud, very terrible music playing on floor #3, causing me to cover my ears the moment the doors opened there.)
An immediate consequence (not requiring a marker) could be: all the wrong buttons could have sticky stuff on them, and if I touched them, my fingers would then also be sticky and stay that way until I reached a faucet. I’d dislike that quite a bit. It could be tooth paste, jam, peanut butter, paint that hasn’t yet dried … I’d dislike it the most if I didn’t know what the sticky stuff was and thought it might be vomit or snot, but I think something less disgusting, like toothpaste, would do the job just fine. Vomit or snot would be accessively intense, and (I suspect) not speed up my learning process.
Or anytime I pushed the button, there could be a kind of noise that sent shivers down my spine, for example the sound of chalk screeching on a blackboard.
Or anytime I pushed the button, the button itself could spray water in my face, or release the odor of cheap perfume, which is something I can’t stand.
This experience would probably be punishing, and I suspect what would happen to me is, I would move the riding-up-the-elevator task out of the bucket of “habit” and back into the bucket of “pay attention when you do this!” It would stay there longer, allowing me to actually create a functional habit, and by the time I moved it back to the habit container, I WOULD be able to unconsciously get it right even when I was daydreaming.
When it comes to the elevator, I’m happy learning just over time. I really don’t care. So there’s zero reason for an aversive consequence, however well implemented, that would speed up the learning process. The stakes aren’t just low, there are no stakes. I wouldn’t mind pushing the wrong button for another month. That’s why I said, whether learning speed matters depends on the task.
I can also imagine that some learners would not learn at all, not even in 2 months, if nothing happened when they pushed the wrong button. That’s why teaching style needs to take into account who your learner is. If the task has zero stakes and the learner doesn’t progress, does it matter? Maybe not! That’s up to you, the teacher.
For other tasks, like crossing a busy highway, learning speed absolutely matters. I wouldn’t want my mind to shift this task into the “don’t pay attention” bucket before I was sure I had installed a strong habit of checking whether I was about to get run over by a car or not. The faster I learned this, the safer I would be. So in this scenario, if I was a slow learner who shifts tasks to the “whatever” category too fast, it would arguably be in my best interest to implement an undesired consequence for stepping off the sidewalk without checking what’s going on first.
Why do I bore you with my elevator ruminations this morning? I’m stuck at home with a nasty cold. And I think it’s relevant for dog training. I’d love anyone’s thoughts! Do you agree with me? How we teach should be about who the learner is and what the task is? If not … what should it be about? I want to hear your perspective! Also, of course, it’s not either habit or consequence. Most things (like crossing streets and riding elevators) become habits eventually either way.
Before I let you go, let me give you a couple news since I haven’t shared a blog post in a while and A LOT has happened since the last one!
Patreon
If you liked this text and want to see more like it, as well as other thoughts and videos about balanced dog and human “training,” as well as thoughts about different cultures, adapting to them, and being downwardly mobile … join one of my paid Patreon tiers. The reason they exist is that I need your support … and by now, there’s a big backlog of (mostly) videos to go through!
Free-roaming dogs journey!
I’m planning a small trip to observe and discuss the free-roaming dogs of Colombia next year. I’ll take between 4 and 6 people, and since this is the very first time I’m going to organize something like this, I will keep it as budget-y as possible! Send me an e-mail if you’re interested, and I’ll invite you to our first video meeting where you get to chime in about content, planning and even when we go!