Concept Training

Are you looking for something incredibly cool and skilful to add to the breadth of training you already do with your animals?

Or do you fancy the joy of figuring out the puzzle of communicating an abstract concept to your non-verbal learner and give them the tools to show you how they see the world?

Or do you care for an animal who currently has limited mobility due to age or injury and you’re wondering how you can still keep them mentally engaged?

Or do you perhaps have an animal who finds the world sometimes overwhelming and you’re looking for predictable and well-rehearsed games you can play with the fingers on your hands to immediately give them a known world to enter and work within?

If any of the above resonated with you, then concept training might just be the right thing for you.

This course builds upon Foundations to Concept Training. The goal of the course is to enable you to teach the concept of size discrimination to your animal training partner to enable them to tell apart bigger from smaller and full from empty. We will systematically generalise the skill so that they can apply this concept to any set of objects or patterns in the future.

We will cover:

• what is concept training
• what makes something a concept
• the pros and cons of different setups and indications*
• the handler as a cue
• cue transfer protocol
• teaching opposite concepts in pairs
• ranking relevance of prompts
• ading out prompts
• systematic introduction of novel objects

Premium students have the benefit of instructor coaching with an animal of their choice. The course will likely be easiest with dogs but please do get in touch with me to work with another species.

*This course will only cover teaching a concept. It will not cover the foundation behaviours that are mandatory before we can teach a concept. These foundation behaviours are stationing, offering engagement to the handler and an indication of your choice under stimulus control working with a prompt on at least two objects. Therefore Premium students are required to send me a video before they register for this course to demonstrate a few repetitions of two-choice discrimination following your prompt with the animal indicating using any consistent behaviour of your choice. See prerequisite demo video below for some examples of what that might look like. Although it is not mandatory to take the Foundations to Concept Training course if the prerequisites can otherwise be demonstrated, those who would like to learn the prerequisites are recommended to take the foundations course first.