This one's for all the haters.
So last week I made a video all about training
my cats using Classical Conditioning.
If you missed that video you can click
right over here to catch that.
And since that time there have been a few...
Doubting Thomases.
People essentially coming in and saying, "you didn't
actually train your cats."
Now a few of these were just jokes, you know, people saying,
"You don't train cats, cats train you"
And to a certain degree that's actually true.
But some of them were legitimate. Some of them actually thought that
there was no training. It was just pure luck.
So today I want to dispel any doubt.
In particular, there was one message that caught my attention because I thought it
was the perfect encapsulation of this and was so kind.
So here it is from Julie
"I love this man. He's clearly brilliant, kind, and obsessed
with his cats. The perfect man.
However, I'm not convinced he trained them to
that particular sound. I wish he'd made another sound first
before the demented frog/fish sound to see if they were merely coming to the
sound of his voice, as most cats will."
Well this gets to something very
important in classical conditioning. Let me tell you about it
So let's say that I used a bell to train the cats
instead of the demented frog/fish noise
and everything goes well. Good, great, the cats come
when they hear that bell tone.
Now let's say that I buy a second bell,
but this one has a slightly higher pitch.
If I ring that bell and the cats respond to it
by coming when called, then this is called generalization.
Generalization is the idea that you can trigger the same
response using a slightly different stimulus.
So, I could take this to an extreme if I wanted to,
and I could buy multiple bells, all of different pitches,
ring them all, give them the reward whenever they respond to it, and I could
get my cats to respond to any bell tone.
You're a weirdo!
I could take this to an extreme
on the opposite end as well.
I could buy, let's say, 10 or 15 different bell types
and have them respond to only one of them.
This is called discrimination.
Essentially you reward them only when they respond to the appropriate bell
that you want them to, and ignore them for all the other ones.
And then they come to associate the reward with only that one pitch.
Up to this point I've only been engaging in reinforcement.
I make the demented frog/fish noise
and then I reward the cats whenever they respond to it.
But I could go in the opposite direction, too.
Let's say that in 10 years I say to myself, "you know that
was a really bad idea to train the cats to respond to this demented frog/fish
noise because I make it all the time and now they just come whenever I make that
noise and it's really annoying and I just want it to go away.
Well I could do that.
And this is called extinction.
Extinction is essentially untraining.
So if I made the noise and then gave
no response, no reward, the cats would eventually
disassociate the noise with the reward. And then they would stop responding.
So now you know a little bit more about classical conditioning
but the whole point of today's video is to
prove to all the doubters that the cats are
actually trained, so, let's do that.
Alright so I'm in the other room.
I've got Bill right here behind me just hanging out on the cat tree.
Loki is over there eating which
might not be an ideal time to do this whole thing but...
I guess that makes this all the more realistic
Anyway I'm gonna go into this other room
into the office and we're gonna try out a few things to see if we can get the
cats to respond to the call.
So, we'll do this all in one take so that
we're making this legitimate operation.
So right now, as I'm talking, the cats are not
going to come into the room.
They know enough - they have enough discrimination
to know that my normal talking voice does not
equal any sort of treat or prize or reward.
So we're going to try three different things.
We're gonna do a general call to the cats, we're going to
do a call that is similar to the original noise that I use, but is
slightly different, and then we're going to use the original duck/fish
demented duck/fish noise.
Hopefully they respond to only that last one.
I don't know. I would imagine they might respond to the
second one because, you know,
I haven't done any work with them on discriminating between those noises.
But we will find out, so...
Let's see what kind of response we get. Let me move up here.
And let's get started.
So this is the general noise. Let's start off with a general call. Let's do this one.
Hey cats!
No response.
Okay. Let's move on to the next one which would be
a noise that's similar.
Soy.
Soylent.
No response to that one either. So let's do the
final noise, which was the trained one, and see if we can get them.
*frog/fish/duck noise*
A little late, Loki.
But thanks for coming.
Yeah, and there's a Bill.
Hey there buds.
Alright so we did eventually
get a little bit of a response.
Whenever the cat's do come to the call, I've been petting them
to replace the reinforcement, because I can't give them a treat,
nor do I want to give them a treat every single time.
I hope that you enjoyed the video.
I feel like I learned a little bit from all of this.
And I'm gonna be doing another one
in not too long about Operant Conditioning.
So if you want to vote on
what trick I teach them, you can click right up here
to vote in that poll.
We've already got a lot of good responses on the
last video as well.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this and until next time,
I'm Micah. Think about it.