Use It or Lose It: Maintenance and Extinction of Behaviors

Use It or Lose It: Maintaining Your Dog’s Learned Behavior is Key to Successful Longterm Learning and Performance Reliability

By: LukEli K-9, Dog Training and Behavior Modification Professionals

Hank os still looking for his forever home,
contact Great Dane Friends of Ruff Love, if you think it could be yours!

Remember Hank? That shy guy who’s hanging out with the Conlans until he finds his forever home? I’ve been wanting to share a few stories about him in a blog for awhile. It fits perfectly with what I’ll be talking about today which is: maintaining behaviors (which you may or may not want to see continued), as well as extinction of behaviors offered by your dog. I’ll go over extinction of behaviors first.

When I talk about behaviors I’m not just referring to a cue you may have taught your dog, like sit or off. Dogs offer us behaviors all the time in response to the reinforcers, whether primary or secondary, that we (knowingly or otherwise) offer them in return.

Extinction of a behavior can be achieved by withholding reinforcers for a behavior that’s previously been maintained through reinforcement. The behavior goes away because it’s no longer rewarding to the dog and it no longer works.

I’ll give you an example of a behavior that I wanted to stop Hank from continuing and I how it came to be extinct.

Example:

Though it was only for a short period of time, Hank nonetheless became a champion counter surfer. It was fairly early on in his stay with us too, so I was walking a fine line between encouraging confidence building exploration and teaching acceptable behaviors.

One day I was preparing the kitchen to scrub the floor and placed the water bucket on the table to get it out of my way. I started to turn back to the task at hand only to see Hank hop right up on the table, all four feet, and help himself to a cool drink of water (a primary reinforcer). He hopped back down quickly once I took a step towards him. Still, the damage had been done. Once he discovered that the first elevated area in the kitchen came with good stuff, he decided to see what the other counters offered. I found him in the kitchen repeatedly over the course of the next several weeks, front paws on the kitchen counter, sniffing around for a snack. Hank definitely discovered the joys of counter surfing. He was rewarded quite nicely for that confidence building exploration pretty well at first by the food he found on those counters. Hank really loves food. Counters with food? Hank said “Yes, please”!

What would you do if your dog were to jump up on the counter? Some people have told me they would yell, clap, stomp their foot, swat, jerk the dog off the counter, smack, shake a can of coins, say no loudly, or numerous other startling, painful, or aversive things in an attempt to create a negative association with jumping on the counter for the dog.  Aversives can be effective when used correctly and humanely in some instances, but there’s one sure-fire way to get a dog to stop doing something: remove any reinforcement for that behavior. If it doesn’t work they won’t do it (Yes, I said that earlier but it’s worth saying again).

So what did I do to end Hank’s infatuation with all things counter related? After two episodes I removed all food from the counters at all times. No reinforcer for him, should he jump up on the counter if unsupervised. He continued to jump up and look a few times a day for a few weeks, thought the occurrences got less and less over that time (Hank can be pretty determined when he’s previously been reinforced for something. Your dog may get the hint in only a few days). I also said “Hank, off” every time I lured him off the counter. That equaled an extinction of the counter surfing behavior and at the same time I taught him a new cue: off.

Extinction is one method trainers use to get rid of unwanted behavior. When used correctly, extinction is a powerful tool. The key is 100% consistency; never rewarding the unwanted behavior. All of the reinforcers for a behavior must be identified and withheld. If a behavior persists even when put on track for extinction, chances are the dog is still being reinforced in some way. Self-rewarding behaviors(counter surfing is a prime example of such a behavior) can be difficult to overcome. The key, as always, is remaining consistent with your rules.

Follow through is crucial and needs to continue as long as the dog is displaying the behavior. If the undesired behavior is reinforced, even occasionally, that behavior will become much more resilient to extinction.

A schedule of reinforcement like this is called a variable reinforcement schedule. It’s exactly what you should use to get the most reliable performance of behaviors from your dog (more on that in another blog).

Pretty ironic, don’t you think? You don’t want your dog to do something, but when you don’t remove reinforcers you’re making darn sure they’ll try their hardest to do it even more! In Hank’s example, had I not kept the counters clear and he found a morsel of food even once or twice in all those attempts, it would have encouraged him to continue trying. He probably would’ve gotten lucky again eventually and the cycle would continue.

In some cases it may seem that, for example clearing all your counters of any food for a few weeks is too much of a task to accomplish. In some cases the easiest, most effective plan is to never set the dog up for committing to something you deem undesirable. If the dog has zero access to the kitchen, the unwanted behavior of counter surfing can not continue. Take into account how badly you want the behavior to become extinct before deeming the task of clearing the counters “too much to handle”. Remember that any form of dog training,whether it be through extinction of behaviors or reinforcement of them, takes time, effort, and consistency.

Speaking of consistency, lets briefly talk about how to maintain a behavior you want to keep reoccurring. Now that you’ve read how to end a behavior, it should be pretty obvious how to maintain a behavior. You guessed it! Reinforce that behavior occasionally once you’ve gone through the four stages of learning and reached the maintenance phase. You have to practice what your dog has learned fairly regularly in order for them to continue to perform a behavior that works for them. You also have to remember to reward them variably as you practice the behavior you want to keep occurring. Remember, “Use It or Lose It”!  Simple as that.

Here’s a little experiment to try at home: stop paying any attention at all to your dog when they’re sitting and see how long it takes for them to stop sitting. If it gets them nothing (food, praise, or otherwise) it won’t take too long for them to walk away. Now, variably reinforce that same sit, and observe how often your dog offers that behavior even when you don’t ask them to perform it. They’ll try it to see if it works for well...forever! if you follow through on the maintenance stage of learning.

This principal of extinction can be used in numerous different applications in dog training and behavior modification. Contact a trainer at LukEli K-9 today to speak with us about how we can help your family reach your training or behavior modification goals.