Author Archives: Jason J Kim

training pets with punishment and reinforcement

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My family recently got a puppy.  Like most dogs in a new environment, he liked to go to the bathroom wherever he felt like going.  In the beginning we used to just punish him by yelling or something to try and scare him from doing it again.  He still would constantly keep peeing around inside the house.  We thought that he would have learned by now, but clearly he hasn’t.  He was trained to use a pad, but every once in a while he will find a different spot.  He learned a lot, but not enough to stop.  My mom found a new tactic to use however.  Now instead of trying to punish, she would reinforce it.  But not reinforce him peeing around the house.  She takes a paper towel, gets a little bit of the pee on it, and puts it on the pad.  Then she brings the puppy to the pad, let’s him sniff it, to know it’s his.  After that she will reward him with a treat.  It is difficult to change to this style of conditioning because he was already used to receiving treats a few times randomly throughout the day.  So it is a little earlier to determine if it will work one hundred percent, in case someone gives him a treat at a time other than when he pees on the pad.  I was a little skeptical of this idea at first because we are trying to also get him to pee when we take him on walks because he usually loves to try and run the whole time he is outside instead of actually going to the bathroom.  Hopefully by the time school ends he will have learned what he should and should not be doing.

Memory loss

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Recently, my mom told me about some business trip she went on.  It was a pretty typical thing, nothing unusual about it.  But she then told me about something “strange.”  She mentioned about how she couldn’t remember where her hotel room was.  She usually does have a pretty bad memory, so i wasn’t surprised by this.  She only remembered because her boss led her towards the right direction.  Along the way, he mentioned that she probably forgot about where the room was located because it was not that important to her.  It reminded me of the example from class about how when we try to memorize phone numbers and once we dial it we tend to forget.  The number isn’t going to be important to us once it’s dialed.  Why would we want to remember?  Even at amusement parks, my mom struggles to remember where we would even park.  Luckily they have letters or some other type of marker to help divide the parking lot into sections.  They are the little clues that we need to be able to remember things.

Attempt at conditioning

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Last semester, my close friends and I spent a lot of nights staying up late.  Staying up till 3 am maybe watching a movie, or just talking.  Eventually it caught up to us and we would feel tired throughout the whole day, but we would still just sit around.  Soon enough we became more productive during the time we stayed up late.  We would bring in some work, and many of us had similar classes, so we would be able to work together and help each other out as we worked.  But the only problem with this was one of our friends would still decide to not do any work.  This problem is still occurring now, and we are trying to help our friend start.  During past few weeks, due to a lack of difficult work, we all just hung out, not doing much.  But now that some exams are coming up, everyone started to study more.  We attempted to get our friend to study by having everyone around our friend study.  We would all be quiet, and focused, hoping that would persuade our friend into wanting to study too, since it would be like a last option for our friend.  Our friend’s mind was still set on not doing work, even though there is an exam coming up very soon.  We all want to have fun, but we are too worried that our friend may get stuck behind because of the lack of effort our friend puts forth into studying.   A big part of the problem we have with getting through to our friend is the fact that our friend is often alone doing whatever, so if our friend were to get bored of us studying, then our friend can leave and do whatever.  Hopefully we can get our friend conditioned to study with us when we study, especially since we can all help him with at least one of his classes.