Once your dog learns about behavior markers they will wait for it.
You’ve read the blog on Positive Reinforcement right? Now we need to talk about behavior markers. You know that association is how positive reinforcement works. Positive activity, treat or reward for doing a behavior = reinforcement. This you have to understand to “get” positive reinforcement.
Dogs are smart, even when we don’t quite know what we are doing; they somehow learn what we are trying to teach them. But, if we learn how to teach our dogs it can become a speedy and rewarding process. Many years ago clickers came into light in the world of training. I learned the concept of clicker training way back in the 90s. Since learning about positive reinforcement and clicker training I never looked back on the neanderthal method of yank and choke.
Behavior markers were invented in the 60/70s by Keller Breland, Marian Breland Bailey, and Bob Bailey. Its first widespread use was with marine animals. The reason being was when you had to get a marine animal to understand what the “correct” behavior at a distance was they needed something to let them animal know, a whistle.
Let’s say that you are training a dolphin to swim across a pool and hit a balloon on the other side. How do you let the dolphin know that their touching the balloon is the correct behavior? You need something to bridge the behavior to the reward, a behavior bridge or marker.
A behavior marker can be a sound or word. I like to teach training with behavior markers because it is the best way to train. That said many of my clients do not want to use a marker or just cannot get the hang of working it into their training. Like I said, dogs can be trained without markers. But if you really want to get into training big time then you will want to use a marker.
A marker, whether it be a sound or word first has to be linked to the reinforcement (treat, ball, tug toy etc). Linking it the reinforcement to the marker is done easily with repetition. I like to use “yes” as my marker; it has been my marker for many years. So it looks something like this “yes” treat, “yes” treat, “yes” treat; until the dog is obviously getting that the word “yes” means a treat is to follow.
The item of reinforcement MUST ALWAYS be used with the bridge or marker. If you do not follow up with a reward then your marker will lose some of it’s power. The behavior marker or bridge is used to mark a behavior that is appropriate or desired by you. It follows the desired behavior instantly, the reward comes after and can lag if need be. The most important thing with markers is the timing of the mark. Timing is everything, which is why we often slow the learning curve with ours dogs, do to bad timing. Next blog is on timing.
Questions?