pressure v release

Alyth is right, it's the release that is the reward and indicates the horse has made the correct response. OP you are right in that they learn from the release.
This is why it is so important to reward the slightest try by releasing the pressure quickly. Horses soon catch on. If you are in a situation where someone is maintaining pressure on a horse after getting the correct response or attempt at the correct response they are doing nothing to train the horse. That's why being quick to release is so important, and finding neutral when you are getting the right response is also an important part of the technique.
 
All animals learn from pressure and release :) They learn because they want the pressure to stop - and so they seek ways to make it stop. When what they just did made it stop, they learn that this is worth doing next time there's pressure. If the pressure doesn't release, nothing is learned - it hasn't gone away and nothing you've done has helped - all that causes is stress.

However I do get tired of people saying the release is a reward :) When you have been wearing too tight shoes all day and your feet are throbbing, you feel relief when you take them off - the pressure is released. However, you don't then put the shoes on again because you're so keen to feel that relief again. A reward is something you seek out because it's pleasant and enjoyable, and the presence of a reward makes you feel the whole experience associated with it is nice. If you think of the shoe example, the whole experience is unpleasant, and if the shoes are really uncomfortable, you'll try quite hard to avoid having anything to do with them at all in the future ;)

So horses - like all animals including humans - learn from the release of pressure, but separately, horses like all animals including humans learn from earning rewards (and this, they enjoy :)).
 
I find the more practiced I get at this I'm able to find the point of release just before the horse does the correct response, ie if filly plants and I need to apply a bit of pressure I can usually sense the moment she has decided to move forwards thus I release the pressure and then she comfortably moves forwards. I wish I had known about pressure and release and advance and retreat when I first started out! Only in the past year have I truly understood the concept!
 
I don't like the example of tight shoes.

To be working at the optimum, the pressure needs to be as light as you can make it and the release as rapid.

The release is its own reward, but I see the advantages of a targeted reward.
 
Put any animal in an uncomfortable situation and it will normally try different things to remove itself from the discomfort. Even a single celled amoeba will move to avoid a blob of acid.

Offer the same animal the option of getting into a more comfortable situation from the status quo and it will normally opt to move into that situation if it can (e.g. The amoeba will move towards food rather than remain hungry).

The motivating "trigger" could be pressure on a head collar, a slice of carrot, removing tight shoes, etc. It really doesn't matter what words you use to describe the behaviour so long as you understand the principles and how they work in practice.

Of course, if the stimulation is too extreme, the behaviour may be violent (rearing) but it will USUALLY be random to start with. So, light pressure on the head collar may initially (and probably will) cause the horse to pull back. The key is to maintain gentle pressure so it learns that that doesn't work and will try something different. I emphasise "gentle" because this is where less actually does work best. Hopefully, the tries will include moving forwards. When it does, the pressure must be released instantly.

That move might simply involve the horse shifting its weight in the direction of the pull. Instant release of pressure will encourage a bigger try, until it learns to take that first step.

Intelligence is a measure of the ability to store past experience and use that behaviour to solve current problems. Incidentally, an animal behaviourist was asked which he thought was the most intelligent animal. His reply was, "All animals are intelligent in what concerns them". Wise words.

The key to training is to make success important to the animal so it remembers what it has learnt and will use the experience to solve similar problems in the future.
 
OK, if you don't like the tight shoes example, here's another, from my own experience yesterday.

You get on a rush hour subway train. There are a lot of people. At the next stop, a large group of people get on, and you move backwards until you meet an obstruction, when you can't move any further. Nobody is touching you. Nobody is pressing on you. But you feel uncomfortable with how close they are, and you look for ways to relieve this "pressure". You shift a bit to the left, and you move your face away so that even if you're pressed up against the person next to you, you don't have to smell their bad breath :cool:.

At the next stop, several people get off, and there is now a space next to the person who is standing very close to you. You immediately move into this space and feel relief.

Now - is this a reward? Do you quickly press yourself back up against the person with bad breath, so that you can feel that wonderful sensation again? Or do you move down the train to get as far away from them as possible.

So there's a situation where nobody touches you, nobody is hurting you, and you can detect the instant the situation improves due to the movement you made. Is that similar enough to what the horse might feel? And do you still believe that the relief is a reward, so that you would willingly experience the situation again in order to obtain it?

I don't :) I haven't been told by someone once that release of pressure was a reward, instead I started off by learning about reward and relief, and then applied it to how humans, and then other animals, feel about situations. Which is why I see release as a motivator, but totally different from a reward, which is also motivating but in the sense that a human (or other animal) will seek it out, rather than move away from it.
 
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Horses are touch sensitive - this is why bitless bridles work so well!
The brakes on my horse are great now he's bitless.
They respond to pressure and release but run from pain.
 
Sorry, I can't agree Palerider. I don't think we can say a release is a reward. A reward is an added 'something', a positive, whereas release from pressure takes something away, a negative.

They can both be reinforcing. But they're not the same thing at all and I think it's confusing to intimate that taking something away is, at the same time, adding something.

For instance if the pressure is released as my horse steps forward, that's a negative (the pressure has been taken away). If he steps forward and I give him a treat (a reward) that's a positive as something has been added.

Most of us use pressure and release, some of us use rewards as well.

At its very simplest, if my boss has been on at me to get a report out on time (pressure) and when I eventually do he stops going on at me (release), I don't feel rewarded, just very relieved! If however, he stops going on at me and lets me leave early, or buys me coffee and a donut, or gives me a nice big pay rise - well then I'd feel rewarded!
 
Pale Rider said:
Blurr, I find understanding what I'm doing much simpler by avoiding anthropomorphic parallels.
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Erm, I wasn't being anthropomorphic. I gave an animal example and a human example and I don't think I muddled them up. :confused:

But from what you've said about release from pressure being a reward I think you might have muddled your positives with your negatives - hey ho.
 
I think we are getting mental and physical pressure confused. Halter release is physical, therefore also a reward in its removal. The human examples are mental/emotional stresses and therefore are in fact releases.
 
So eye contact with a horse (or other animal) cannot be pressure??

I do think the definitions are confusing the issue! Who cares what you call it? If it works, it works.

I'd a visitor with a 4yo child here the other day. We all came in cold from looking at ponies. The child was encouraged to sit in front of the blow heater. When she was warm enough, she started whining that she was now too hot. It did not occur to her to simply move a foot or so to one side because that solution to the problem was outside her experience. One of us had to physically pick her up and move her to stop the whining! No doubt, if we'd left her (!), she would eventually have started experimenting and moving and discovered that it was cooler, to one side, out of the direct blast from the heater.

I don't understand the problem of "anthropomorphising" either. In these examples, we are not making the huge leap of assuming that animals think like humans but taking cause-and-effect back to fundamentals where they apply to most forms of animal life.
 
I posted a query on a similar thread which I don't think anyone answered.

A trainer is trying to teach a foal to lead. So he/she applies pressure on the head collar while simultaneously offering a slice of carrot.

Now, is that positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement when the foal moves forward? And what's it called if nothing happens?

Just to add a bit of spice to the question, at the split second the trainer applies pressure and offers a carrot, his/her assistant moves towards the foal's rear end. If the foal moves now, what is it called? And if it doesn't?

On the other hand, do the definitions really matter so long as the foal learns to lead??:) I suspect I'll get there a lot sooner without wasting my time talking about it!:D
 
Let's say we compare two training sessions in which we are teaching the horse to move a particular way - for sake of argument, backwards, although it really doesn't matter which. With pressure-and-release, we put on some pressure and when the horse does what we want we take it off again. With reward-based training, the horse gets a treat for doing the right thing.

(Of course, we don't necessarily expect the horse to know immediately what is wanted and therefore the behaviour has to be shaped in small enough steps. This applies to both the pressure-and-release and to the reward-based training, though perhaps more so with the latter because we don't have the advantage of being able to push or pull the horse in the direction we want.)

So one session consists of pressure-release-pressure-release and the other nothing-reward-nothing-reward. Which feels more rewarding to the horse overall? I tend to think the latter would be. That's because we have to set the nice feeling that relief from pressure gives against the no-so-nice feeling of the pressure that precedes it: the feeling of relief doesn't fully 'compensate' for discomfort that is being relieved. In other words, the net balance is negative.

If that were not the case and if feelings of relief (after pressure) were positively rewarding for animals overall, they would go out of our way to make themselves physically uncomfortable, just for the pleasure the relief from that discomfort would give them. That may happen in humans, but I'm not sure it's so common: in general and most of the time, people, like animals, prefer to stay in a comfort zone. Do we see discomfort-seeking behaviour in horses? I don't think so! If discomfort led to greater reward though its relief, we'd see horses deliberately not eating in order that they could then satisfy their self-inflicted hunger pangs. Or press themselves repeatedly against pointy objects. Or, indeed, seek out pressure from their human handlers and trainers!

So is really that helpful or honest to describe release of pressure as a reward, when the net effect of pressure-release-pressure-release is actually not rewarding?
 
Dry Rot said:
I posted a query on a similar thread which I don't think anyone answered.

A trainer is trying to teach a foal to lead. So he/she applies pressure on the head collar while simultaneously offering a slice of carrot.

Now, is that positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement when the foal moves forward?
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It's a mixture of positive and negative reinforcement. :) At least, if the foal learns to move forward. If its behaviour doesn't change, then nothing was reinforced.

And what's it called if nothing happens?
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Er... not 'success', that's for sure! ;)

Just to add a bit of spice to the question, at the split second the trainer applies pressure and offers a carrot, his/her assistant moves towards the foal's rear end. If the foal moves now, what is it called? And if it doesn't?
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Presumably this increased the pressure on the foal to the point where its reluctance to move (despite the pull on the headcollar and the lure of the carrot) was overcome. Does the foal get the carrot now?

On the other hand, do the definitions really matter so long as the foal learns to lead??:) I suspect I'll get there a lot sooner without wasting my time talking about it!:D
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No of course they don't. They only matter if you want to talk about what you did with other people who use obscure and confusing phrases like 'negative reinforcement'! :D
 
fburton said:
It's a mixture of positive and negative reinforcement. :) At least, if the foal learns to move forward. If its behaviour doesn't change, then nothing was reinforced.


Er... not 'success', that's for sure! ;)


Presumably this increased the pressure on the foal to the point where its reluctance to move (despite the pull on the headcollar and the lure of the carrot) was overcome. Does the foal get the carrot now?


No of course they don't. They only matter if you want to talk about what you did with other people who use obscure and confusing phrases like 'negative reinforcement'! :D
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There are them that do and others who just talk about it.;)
 
Dry Rot said:
So eye contact with a horse (or other animal) cannot be pressure??

I do think the definitions are confusing the issue! Who cares what you call it? If it works, it works.

I don't understand the problem of "anthropomorphising" either. In these examples, we are not making the huge leap of assuming that animals think like humans but taking cause-and-effect back to fundamentals where they apply to most forms of animal life.
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I'd call eye contact pressure.

I think that the examples peoiple use when "anthropomorphising" are poor and confusing.

I'm not really bothered about the academic aspect of behaviour, I need to be able to get it right from a saddle, not a desk chair.:)
 
Pale Rider said:
I'd call eye contact pressure.

I think that the examples peoiple use when "anthropomorphising" are poor and confusing.

I'm not really bothered about the academic aspect of behaviour, I need to be able to get it right from a saddle, not a desk chair.:)
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PR, you know, I think we agree. But it seems a waste of time trying to discuss it here."Shutting down" might be the next interesting thing to discuss -- illustrated with a few anthropomorphicalogical examples from HHO!:D:D:D

I have a very interesting book here you'd enjoy. Or perhaps not. It is "Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach", by John Alcock, published by Sinauer Associates, ISBN 0-87893-022-1. But then it doesn't discuss horses.... Your local public library should be able to find you a copy through Inter-Library Loan.

Knowledge enables one to try different solutions to solving a problem. So, rather than beating a horse to get it to load, modern knowledge tells us there may be a better way. You can never have enough knowledge, even though you might think much of it is irrelevant at the time. There is an old Chinese saying, "A wise man can even learn from a fool". To which I will quickly add, "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool" (As You Like It).:D
 
Dry Rot said:
PR, you know, I think we agree. But it seems a waste of time trying to discuss it here."Shutting down" might be the next interesting thing to discuss -- illustrated with a few anthropomorphicalogical examples from HHO!:D:D:D

I have a very interesting book here you'd enjoy. Or perhaps not. It is "Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach", by John Alcock, published by Sinauer Associates, ISBN 0-87893-022-1. But then it doesn't discuss horses.... Your local public library should be able to find you a copy through Inter-Library Loan.

Knowledge enables one to try different solutions to solving a problem. So, rather than beating a horse to get it to load, modern knowledge tells us there may be a better way. You can never have enough knowledge, even though you might think much of it is irrelevant at the time. There is an old Chinese saying, "A wise man can even learn from a fool". To which I will quickly add, "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool" (As You Like It).:D
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Thanks Dry Rot I'll have a look for that book, always interested in anything behavioural.
 
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