Attention at a Distance

In this episode, Jerry Bradshaw discusses:

The importance of mandatory eye contact and how to generalize for distance work.
Moving from negative reinforcement to positive punishment to move from escape to avoidance.
Training progressions to train mandatory eye contact with your dog.
Transitioning from lure to reward to variable reward.

Key Takeaways:

To get your dog to pay attention to your face, consider putting a food reward in your mouth – like hot dogs, cheese, or chicken.
Build duration before you build distance in your training progression. If they aren’t paying attention at 2 feet, they’re not going to pay attention at 20 feet.
You have to take the training wheels off as you move between training progression levels.
When you get to trial, you have to operate on an extinction condition – there is no reinforcement or rewards on the field, so it is better to have your dog on a very, very thin variable reward schedule by that point. That only comes through training progressions and systematic generalization.

“If we never get to the point where the dog understands there’s a correction for inattention, then that’s not going to be a very reliable tool for us for attention at a distance. We want to generalize it. We want to continue to create a systematic desensitization to all the things that the decoy might do.” — Jerry Bradshaw

Episode References: