Mindfulness is the ability we all have to be fully present in the moment and aware of out surroundings. Mindfulness means having a constant awareness of the present, whilst non-judgementally experiencing our thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and surroundings. Mindfulness is essential for effective animal training as it not only ensures that we are aware of the subtleties of the animal’s behaviour so that our training is accurate, but also keep us safe through an increased awareness of our surrounding and the animals reaction to it.
When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts focus on what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than revisiting the past or imagining the future. There are three core elements are important for mindfulness to be successful: intention, attention, and attitude (Shapiro & Carlson, 2009; 2014). Intention is informed by what is our aim, vision or aspiration is for this time; it is what you hope to get from practising mindfulness. Attention requires us to be fully aware and tuned into the present moment, rather than being preoccupied with the past or future. Finally, how we attend to the present, our attitude, should be open, kind, and curious. Each element supports the others.
Meditation aims to train awareness, focus and perspective through mental exercises. Mindful mediation is the practice of being aware of the unconditional truth of the present without judgement. Most mindful meditation techniques focus on aspects of body, breath and thought awareness during a period of quiet sitting.
A recent study has found that just 40 days of mindfulness meditation training can change the structure of your brain and improve your quality of life. The results centred on the parietal cortex with a relative increase in cortical thickness in the left precuneus. Furthermore, in the upper left parietal cortex and bilateral inferior parietal lobe, cortical thickness increased in the left inferior temporal gyrus after 40 days. Participants also report decreases symptoms of depression and trait anxiety after the mindfulness training.
This article is super interesting for two reasons. One, the complexity of olfactory social cues in many animals is fascinating and seems to create a world of sentience and awareness that we have very little access to. Two, it shows (once again) that rats, an unfairly maligned creature, are capable of great care for others, as are many other social species.
“How do animals that help their brethren manage to prioritize those most in need? A new study shows that rats can use odor cues alone to determine how urgently to provide food assistance to other rats in need.”
An interesting article came out in Nature (abstract and link below) providing more evidence that neural links between the hippocampus and amygdala are necessary for associative fear learning. This evidence reinforces the idea that to reduce / undo fear association learning, we need to focus on amygdala activity reducing training techniques and environmental constructs, such as:
Training using positive reinforcement and pleasant stimuli, rather than aversives that may further activate the amygdala-hippocampus network.
Deconditioning fear through methods less likely to trigger fear/panic: such as systematic desensitisation, cognitive activation and counter conditioning.
Watching the animals body language to make sure you are not near the fear/panic threshold for the fear triggering stimuli while training so that the amgdala -hippocampal pathways are not activated and the associative memory strengthened.
Increase oxytocin through stable, social interactions allowing supportive attachments to form
Reduce overall environmental stress
“Abstract
In contextual fear conditioning, experimental subjects learn to associate a neutral context with an aversive stimulus and display fear responses to a context that predicts danger. Although the hippocampal–amygdala pathway has been implicated in the retrieval of contextual fear memory, the mechanism by which fear memory is encoded in this circuit has not been investigated. Here, we show that activity in the ventral CA1 (vCA1) hippocampal projections to the basal amygdala (BA), paired with aversive stimuli, contributes to encoding conditioned fear memory. Contextual fear conditioning induced selective strengthening of a subset of vCA1–BA synapses, which was prevented under anisomycin-induced retrograde amnesia. Moreover, a subpopulation of BA neurons receives stronger monosynaptic inputs from context-responding vCA1 neurons, whose activity was required for contextual fear learning and synaptic potentiation in the vCA1–BA pathway. Our study suggests that synaptic strengthening of vCA1 inputs conveying contextual information to a subset of BA neurons contributes to encoding adaptive fear memory for the threat-predictive context.”
Science has confirmed that dogs can recognise facial expressions of emotion in situations devoid of other social cues to human emotion (e.g. body language and voice).
Often it is useful, potentially even necessary, to have more than one cue for a behaviour. For example, most horses need to know a voice and physical cue for the paces and to move back from a light touch to the chest and a voice command. Dogs will clue into the point and “off” signals that come soon after that pleasant, muddy romp on the two-legs furniture. Rats learn the screeching and frantic hand waving that prevents them chewing, or at least tries to. And cats train their two-leg servants to clean up after them through a combination of auditory retching cues and olfactory ones which trigger retching. Below my dog Jack performs the speak command to a voice and hand signals to demonstrate a behaviour which has been trained to multiple cues.
If you are training an animal, or are a particularly well-read cat training a human, it is useful to be able to teach more than one cue for a behaviour without confusing the trainee. There are several ways duel cuing or multi cuing can be achieved. You can:
Teach the cues separately
Duel cue
Add cues to an established behaviour
Teaching Two Cues Separately
Often people teach two or more cues for a behaviour separately. For example,when teaching a horse to trot whilst free schooling a visual cue or a voice signal is often used. However, during ridden work the horse will learn trot from a physical cue – a light touch with the rider’s legs. The desired end behaviour is always the same despite more than one type of cue. Separate, multiple cues can be taught to animals in this manner, the same way the horse is taught to trot from a voice command from the ground and a physical cue on board. Although, occasionally you may find that the cue-response establishment becomes dependent on the situation and that the cue may not transfer to other situations (a process know as generalisation). Lots of horse that free school very well will do the ear flick of confusion if verbally asked to trot whilst ridden. This can be overcome by introducing the cues in a range of environments so that they don’t become place or time specific.
Duel Cues
Most duel cues are taught almost accidentally by the cues appearing together during training. Animals, like humans, have implicit cognitive processes specifically designed to quickly identify patterns of events within environments, whether said patterns are circumstantial, correlatory or causal. The implicit mind is responsible for or has a hand in several human behaviours, including what we call ‘gut feeling’, stereotyping, superstitions and learning. For an animal, picking up on the pattern of the cues associated with the behaviour and reward will result in the animal registering both cues as being associated with reward when a certain behaviour is performed. Humans learn associations in much the same way, if you want someone to wash up more often, make sure something pleasant happens soon after and repeat until the washing up behaviour is established. The pleasant occurrence may include a beer or chocolate appearing in the hand of the trainee after the desired behaviour, or maybe just some affection if you are of a mind to be subtle in your human training, or of course, if you are a cat and limited in your reward options.
Back to non-human animal training. A common duel cue is the use of the word “off” and a physical pointing gesture to train an animal to move from an area. both cues are associated with the “off” behaviour being rewarded (assuming the correct training protocol is being used, even if the cream sofa now has muddy paw prints on it).
Duel cuing, thanks to the incredible quickness of animals ability to pick up patterns, is often a successful way to teach two cues for a behaviour. However, occasionally the animal can become stuck needing both cues to perform a behaviour or only learn one of the cues. To solve the animal needing both cues try fading one cue and making one more obvious whilst rewarding the response behaviour until the obvious cue alone will trigger the behaviour. Then reverse the process until both cues trigger the wanted behaviour. If your pet/trainee has only learnt one cue and not the other, the second cue can be taught separately or added as described below.
Adding Cues
As not all training can be planned in advance, sometimes extra cues need to be taught to the animal. It is possible to add additional cues to already established cue-response behaviour patterns. This is how we taught Jack to speak on command to both a voice signal and a hand one. When we first brought him home from the rescue all those years ago, I did a lot of training with him to help establish a relationship, to help him settle in and just for fun because he is a very smart and happy dog to work with. As part of our training Jack was taught to speak through association training, if he barked I said “speak” and rewarded verbally until me saying “speak” caused Jack to bark. There are other ways to teaching the “speak” command but this one is good fun and without pressure. If your dog is liable to be over enthusiastic with the barking you can also teach a silence command or train specifically for one bark.
Once the “speak” command was taught, I thought it would be fun to teach a hand movement to also cue a bark. I paired this cue with the voice command several times, rewarding the response, and then faded the voice command very gradually and emphasised the hand movement until both the hand movement alone and voice command alone would result in a bark from Jack. The same procedure can be employed to teach two cues for other behaviours.
*Note* Some people worry that teaching a bark command encourages off command barking, however, I have never found this to be the case unless the dog is confused about the cue. Certainly Jack is never a problem barker, although he will gently, but persistently, moan at you if you are writing a blog post at walk time.
A fair while ago, eminent consciousnesses scientists met at a symposium in England, their purpose was to conclude whether, given our current knowledge on how the brain processes consciousness, non-human animals could be considered conscious. Their conclusion? Animals, particularly mammals, but also birds and possibly other animals, demonstrate neurological potential for consciousness and thus must be considered conscious. Although some scientists, trainers and keepers concluded such long ago, a scientific agreement on this fact allows the discussion on animal welfare to continue, and hopefully move forward, without the limitation of discussion over sentience and consciousness as scientific understanding states that both are possible and observable.
Here is the exact agreement reach at the meeting:
If you want to get a bit more geeky over consciousness and the brain, here is an excellent talk by Christof Koch of Caltech.
Emma Lethbridge Horsemanship 