PDTE 2011 July Newsletter

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PDTE AGM MEETING In SPAIN 25 – 26 September 2010 What is memory? Memory is an accumulation of things that have been learnt, or experiences that have been experienced and that are stored in the brain. This includes facts, events, spatial mapping (where to find things), physical processes / motor skills (how to do activities) Your brain has stored a range of different facts — what you had for breakfast yesterday, the date you were born or that Paris is the capital of France and Helsinki is the capital of Finland. SPATIAL MAPPING just means where things are in life, where you find things, where the bathroom is, how you get from home to work or how you get from home to the supermarket. Also, you remember how to do things. PHYSICAL PROCESSES are what we call motor skills, how to do things like swim or jump or brush your teeth, or play the piano or drive a car. All of these things make up what we call memory. Types of dog memory MEMORY MATTERS Understanding memory and its effects on behaviour modification in the dog As humans we have two main types of memory: 1) DECLARATIVE MEMORY. That means that we can state, or declare, certain facts. • Semantic memory (facts / figures) Semantic memory is memory concerning specific facts such as Helsinki being the capital of Finland, or that the next Olympic games is London 2012. You know (hopefully!) that 2 x 2 = 4 and how to tell the time from looking at a clock face. As far as we can tell dogs do not have semantic memory. • Episodic memory (events) Also part of declarative memory, things we can declare, is EPISODIC MEMORY. This refers to episodes, things that have happened to us or to those around us. The simple word for that is “events”. So you may remember your 25th birthday or your first day at school, or your wedding. Amber Batson, BVetMed MRCVS, ENGLAND All this is part of your declarative memory. Dogs have this type of memory, we may not know the exact details of an event they remember but we all know dogs remember events that happen to them. 2) PROCEDURAL MEMORY This includes motor skills and emotional responses. • Motor skills Playing tennis, for example, is a physical skill. You have to learn how to throw a ball up and how to swing a racket. It is a physical skill to learn to ride a bicycle or a horse, or drive a car, or simply to climb stairs. • Emotional responses Emotional responses, like when you are really scared, involve a physical process like running away, or hiding, known as fight or flight. Emotional responses are part of procedural memory because they involve procedures, things that we do. And this is very relevant because dogs have these types of memories too. To recap, then, as far as we know dogs do not have semantic memory. It is very, very hard to prove that dogs remember facts or figures. Nobody has yet demonstrated that dogs can learn multiplication or addition. They might have a response, but they don’t seem to hold the fact in their head. They don’t know that the capital of Germany is Berlin. But they do have episodic memory; they have event memory and they do have motor skills and emotional responses, which are procedural memory. A dog definitely remembers being beaten up by a cat as an event! That is declarative memory. They remember having had a painful injection at the vet’s. Equally, they can learn motor skills like offering a paw or going through weave bars or catching a rabbit. They also have emotional fight or flight responses. They remember being chased by a horse, but they also knew at that moment how to run away from it. Dogs can learn a whole range of cues to certain activities. They can learn how to negotiate agility courses. For example, a dog can easily run under the agility bar, but he has learnt that in order to get a reward (reinforcement) — whatever that reinforcement is — he should jump over the bar. We’ve been able to teach dogs to find drugs, and they know that if they find the drug, they will get a reward (not the drug). We have taught them to be obedience tasks, agility tasks and even to be assistance dogs – letting us know when the phone rings, picking things up, moving things around. Therefore, if we understand how memory works in dogs, we can be better trainers. It means we can be better at fixing and resolving learnt undesirable behaviours. For example, say I don’t want my dog to jump up anymore. I want it to keep all its feet on the floor when I come home from work, I teach it a new behaviour - a new thing, a new memory. We’ll be better placed to fix behavioural problems if we understand how they got the behaviour in the first place — why they have a memory that causes a problem and very importantly, we might even be able to prevent behavioural problems by affecting their memories as well. We also have something called SHORT- TERM MEMORY and something called LONG-TERM MEMORY. THE HERE AND NOW – Short-term memory Short-term memory is information that’s coming in right now from the environment and from your mind, and you’re aware of it at this moment. But you’re only aware of it for very short periods. Normally you can only hold on to this awareness for a few moments. LONG-TERM memory is information that’s been previously stored, and you retrieve it from where it is stored and use it. Short-term memory seems to contain 5-9 slots. Short-term memory can only hold information within this number of slots for a few seconds before forgetting the information. Increasing the amount of information starts to displace information from the slots. For example, if I were to ask you to close Page 16 PDTE NEWS
PDTE AGM MEETING MEMORY In SPAIN MATTERS 25 – 26 September 2010 your eyes and I read you a number like this one: 5 7 3 8 2 4 1, You would probably be able to write it down after you opened your eyes. You would find it even easier with a short number like 2 7 9 5 4. But if I gave you number like 9 2 4 3 7 0 1 5 6 8 4 3, you would probably not remember the whole sequence. That’s because most mammals seem to have between 5 and 7 slots. Some people have been shown to have 8 or 9 slots, or possibly more, but most people and animals seem to have between 5, 6 or 7. How is this relevant to dogs? Every time you try to train a dog, whether as a trainer or as a behaviourist, or even simply as an owner when out on a walk, the dog probably has a maximum of between 5 and 7 slots in his short-term memory. Think of a dog in a relatively typical training environment, like a training class. What we see is loads of information slamming into the short-term memory slots. For example: • There are new people in the room • A black Labrador is sitting next to the dog • A Golden Retriever is looking over from the back of the room • The training hall smells different • There is a smell of food or treats • The owner is talking • Other people are making all kinds of noises • The owner starts moving around • There’s been a bitch on heat in the room earlier Those are just a few things in that one room that are filling that dog’s short-term memory slots. No wonder we end up with dogs that are confused or switch off because they don’t know what to do. So what we can do is start by looking at ways to free up those slots. We can’t tell our dog not to pay attention to all the other things going on, only to pay attention to us. But there are some other ways we can help. HABITUATION One of the best ways is habituation. In essence, it means learning what you can ignore in the environment, because it’s not associated with anything particularly nice or nasty – it is neutral. Right now you’re not worried about an empty chair in the room with you, because you know chairs don’t just jump up and hit you over the head. You’re not worried about the window, because windows are okay where they are; they are quite neutral. Habituation is a form of what we call NON- ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING. You make no associations with it, so it becomes neutral. And the more things our dogs are habituated to, the more slots are available for learning. Therefore, the more things they can ignore in their environment because they don’t mean anything, the easier it is to train them. Let’s go back to our training class. If the dog who is having his first day at the training class has previously been habituated to e.g. women, men, kids, big dogs, small dogs, female dogs, male dogs, dogs moving around, the village hall — then straight away we would free up some slots. There is no need for the dog to pay particular attention to these neutral stimuli. How common is it in most training classes for the dogs to be well habituated to the things there? Well that depends on the individual dog. It means that group training is quite different for dogs. Therefore it means it may be more appropriate to train a dog and his owner in their own home to start with, rather than in a training class. It’s hard enough for them to do the training in their own lounge — the phone rings and someone comes to the door, the kids might be at home, the ball is under the sofa and then the cat walks in! Let alone being in the village hall with five other dogs and five strangers and a whole host of smells, and maybe needing to pee. If you think about it, it’s really a miracle that dogs learn anything at all. So how do we get them habituated? If something like a chair is going to become a neutral stimulus, the most important thing is that there must be no reinforcement of fear. All experiences of the chair must be neutral, not a single incidence of the chair suddenly moving and hitting the dog. So that means there has to be gradual process, and the things have to be experienced from a distance initially. Because if you don’t know something, and it is suddenly right there in your face, that makes you react anyway. You need to be able to see it from a safe distance and approach it. For example, take dogs and vacuum cleaners. Ideally you want to start off with the vacuum cleaner in another room with the dog free to come and go and explore it and lie beside it and so on. Next you could have the motor running, but it’s still in the other room. Often much later on, you can progress to where it is moving with the dog comfortably nearby. What we must be aware of is that sometimes people think they are habituating but actually they may be flooding – this means presenting something causing fear to the dog where there is no opportunity to escape. If you are unfamiliar with this concept I would recommend you read more about it. Another thing about habituation is that it has to be repeated. A chair will never be neutral until you’ve met a chair countless times and it’s stayed where it is. Our brain is constantly working out how best to survive, and is therefore not prepared to consider something neutral on one meeting alone. That would be a dangerous thing to do. Let’s say you are a wild dog and a cheetah walks past when you’re a 9-week-old puppy, and the brain says, “Hah, I’ve just seen a cheetah and it was neutral!” It’s not really a sensible thing to do — the cheetah might simply be full and not having a wild-puppy-hunting day. Neutral pairings must be repeated in order to be learnt. We also have to practise in different contexts, because again, a chair in a hall might be safe, but a chair half way up the stairs might not be safe at all. It’s the same for a dog. Just because a vacuum cleaner is OK in kitchen doesn’t mean the vacuum cleaner is OK in the lounge. And it doesn’t mean that it’s OK in the garden, either. To recap, when we trying to train our dog in the middle of a park where there are loads of dogs running around, the smell of rabbits, ducks, people, bicycles etc. it is incredibly hard for dogs to learn anything from us. So at the very least, when we’re trying to train something new, the environment needs to be calm, not fearful and not overexciting. It is actually harder to achieve than sometimes we can imagine. It doesn’t mean we can’t do it, but we do need to be aware of the pitfalls. PDTE NEWS Page 17
Page 1 and 2: PDTE NEWS JULY 2011 l Issue 17 www.
Page 3 and 4: BOARD’S CORNER Contents: Board´s
Page 5 and 6: WElCOME OUR NEW MEMBERS Charlotte A
Page 7 and 8: WELCOME OUR NEW MEMBERS Ronja Hypp
Page 9 and 10: WELCOME OUR NEW MEMBERS dog trainin
Page 11 and 12: What‘s up in 2011? PDTE Events, C
Page 13 and 14: What‘s up in 2011? Other Events,
Page 15: Home stories... she was checking up
Page 19 and 20: PDTE AGM MEETING In SPAIN 25 - 26 S
Page 21 and 22: PDTE AGM MEETING In SPAIN 25 - 26 S
Page 23 and 24: Attachments and Relationships initi
Page 25 and 26: Animal Cops in Holland Nelis Verhoe
Page 27 and 28: Living with Newfoundlands quence ma
Page 29 and 30: Canine Gut Flora Nicole Mackie, Eng
Page 31 and 32: IS MY DOG TRYING TO DOMINATE ME? hu

PDTE 2011 July Newsletter

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