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Expedite your teaching:
Don’t fight extinction

Animal trainers often talk about first teaching a behavior and then later adding a cue for that behavior. However, while your animal is learning a behavior, your animal is also learning environmental cues, even if you are not aware of them. Behaviors and cues evolve together. When you return to working in this setting or with these props, your animal will be ready to do this behavior again. So, if you try to teach a new behavior under these same conditions, the learning will be slow. This is because the cues for the original behavior will interfere with the acquisition of the new behavior. Instead, you can speed up learning by changing the environmental cues. This presentation will explain how these cues evolve. Then, we’ll look at several case studies and explore how you can use this knowledge to speed up learning. 

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