I received the following question about Primary/Secondary reinforcement:
“… the delivery of the food from a human hand is something that must be learned (human hand delivering food is safe). So if the food is delivered from a human hand, does that then make it become a secondary reinforcer?” – Curtis White.
No, food is a primary reinforcer; what is happening with the above example is the bird is still being reinforced by the food, something it innately wanted. What the bird has learned is that the approaching hand may contain food; its motivation is to acquire the food, and the bird did not have to learn that the food was desirable. The approaching hand may, with some birds, become a secondary reinforcer as a result of being paired with the primary food reinforcer, but I think it is over-thinking the scenario to say that the “food in the hand” becomes a secondary reinforcer itself.
Also the following was received in response to the “Silver Bullet” article:
“I thought that the need to understand history is a concept based on the medical model. If behavior analysis is the study of the functional relations between behavior and environmental events (Chase, P; 1998), should we need to know the bird’s history to change the behavior?” – Cynthia Schutte.
Yes, my statement that one needs to know the history of the bird one is working with was based upon the fact that the behavior we see today was shaped by the experiences of the bird in its past, its history. Indeed a bird’s history is part of the set of antecedents of the behaviors we observe. While we may not always be able to arrange our training sessions to account for some of those particular antecedents there are many times when being able to do so will assist in changing the observed behavior.
For example, suppose that we are trying to train a newly adopted bird; without knowing at least some of the history of that bird how do we know where to start. Suppose, unknown to the trainer, the bird had previously been forced into and out of a transport crate, trying to train this behavior could be problematic. However, given this knowledge we can adjust our training strategy to desensitize the bird to crates.
It is unfortunate that when some trainers do behavior analysis they typically only consider the obvious antecedents, the ones in the immediate environment, forgetting that the whole history of the bird is part of the antecedent package.
It is important to remember that the consequences of a behavior either increase or decrease the likelihood that the behavior will be presented in the future. Those consequences become a part of the bird’s history and factor into the antecedents of future behavior too. If a bird has a history of getting rewarded for approaching the trainer then when the trainer cues the bird to step onto the hand that history will factor into the bird’s decision to make the step. History plays a very important role in an animal’s decision making and a good trainer needs to know as much history as possible to set their birds up for success.
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Keep Soaring,
Sid.