Today was a day of hard work. I started with my shape discrimination chicken nro 47 with two shapes in the table and color discrimination chicken nro 52 with bigger black target with dot on the table.
With the shape chicken we progressed slowly but steadily to three targets. I stayed in two shape targets long enough because I felt that my timing was not too good. Ones I got my timing good I was brave enough to move to three targets.
I felt that I was really doing good with three shapes and was already after few training rounds good to progress to four shapes. So I introduced the last new shape.... and everything fell apart. The chicken would not peck the polygon any more; she would go after the shape that I introduced last - square. If I waited chicken to peck all she wanted to the square and then to reward her by placing back the polygon to give her the opportunity for reward, all she would choose was any other shape rather than polygon. I did two tries and she got the polygon only few times. Then I stopped really think. What had Mr. Bailey been telling us:"Change your behavior!" So I had to do something different. I decided to move back to three targets and work on that again. Chicken did really good job with three targets and we went faster and faster. Ones the rate of reinforcement was really big and she did more than 80 % of time correct I moved back to four targets.
Shape chicken did fine again with four targets but not excellent anymore. The rate of reinforcement had dropped down a lot. I was wondering that, when Mr. Bailey walked by the table. He wanted to feel the chicken's crop. He pointed out that my chicken was full, her crop was all large and heavy. That's why she was not that interested of the hot target anymore.
When we got the four targets on the table the training time was moved from 30 seconds up to 60 seconds. That kind of helped but I was still having hard time feeding my bird and changing the places of targets. Then I started to feed the chicken behind her and I had more time to change targets to different places while she was getting back look the targets.
With my color bird nro 52 I did two rounds of big black target with small dot and I was able to get myself in really fast state that she did not peck the white dot twice. We did really well and I was going to work on her with my timing some more, but then we started going on with the color discrimination task. First we did the color evaluation like we did with the shapes yesterday. There was first all the three colors on the table blue, yellow and red. My chicken went after the blue and when I removed the blue she went after yellow. So red became our hot target.
I even added the colors to chicken's name tag on her crate that I would not forget them.
With the color chicken we progressed really fast. At first she started to give me that "two pecks in red color" -thing that she had done yesterday for the black target, but I started to feed her higher up so I had more time click and feed her. With the two targets red and yellow we did so good again that I was able to move fast to all three targets. Mr. Bailey had explained earlier, that chicken see the colors better than the shapes so the progress would be faster with color discrimination. With three colors we did so good for few rounds, but then something started to go wrong. My chicken would not any more peck the red target only one time or not even two times but she started to beck the target three times before she came to the feeding cup. What was this?!! The chicken did this again for few rounds and we tried to pick a pattern on chicken's behavior with my coach Candy. We noticed that when the target was further away from me the chicken would peck the three times and not go to the feeding cup, but by the time we were figuring this out the chicken was doing three pecks on red in every position that I had the red on.
Here is marked a place that Mrs. Ryan put on the wall. It is the place to go bang your head when you have done a serious training mistake.
So I got a chicken that pecked three times the hot target. Great! My coach Candy went to talk to Mr. Bailey how to coach me on. Mr. Bailey told us to pay attention to the place where I was feeding. I had started to feed the chicken behind her to gain more time since she was so fast. Chicken probably thought that I was not feeding at all. When she would peck three times I usually would move the cup little bit closer to get her to the feeding cup. That reinforced pecking three times even more and generalized it to other positions too. So I started to feed the chicken closer and the problem disappeared really soon and I was able to move on to the next step.
The next step was to add waiting time for the chicken to have the hot target presented while there was two cold targets on the table. Here is Mr. Bailey explaining the most interesting part of the discrimination training. How to get the chicken to wait the target shape to appear?
You gradually add the time how long the hot target is away from the table. First few second, then few more and finally 20 seconds. Eventually the bird should be waiting 20 seconds doing nothing for the target to appear. When we have the bird build up for that Mr. Bailey is going to do en evaluation on our bird. That means that he will come to the table and take the hot target out of the table and move the two cold targets on the table in order to get the chicken peck the wrong targets. If the chicken don't peck in 20 seconds the wrong targets it graduates from the class. I don't know if I'm ever going to make it there with the shape chicken, but with the color chicken we got up to 8 seconds waiting time.
Last time I took the color chicken back to the cage he went to sleep right away. I guess she was getting full too.
I had kind of overload of information today so the lectures went by so fast and I don't think I remember anything on those today.
After today's training day we stayed at the Legacy for evening together. We had pizza together and after that Mr. Bailey told wild stories from his professional training career.
Here is the wildest. A real cat that had an inbuilt spying system and had a trained keep going signal.
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