Can animals can do crazy things after training?

Last month, I saw a amazing youtube video. A dog named Jumpy can write its name by having a brush in its mouth. I was amazed by that. Later I found more crazy videos. A cat can play piano, a dog can do simple math by barking, and a monkey can even drive. It seems that some animals can do crazy things after training. Thus I found some researches about this.

Video about the dog that know how to write 

I find that people usually give animals some food for reward after they do what human wants them to do. They repeat this for a long time, and later animals can do certain thing. This is called classical conditioning-animals learn to associate two stimuli and thus to anticipate events (principle of psychology). Ivan Pavlov, one of the most famous physiologist in 20 century, did a famous lab about classical conditioning. “In order to eliminate possible influences, they isolated the dog in a small room, secured it in a harness, and attached a device to divert its saliva to a measuring instrument”(principle of psychology).

 

440px-ivan_pavlov_nlm3

(Ivan Pavlov)

In classical conditioning, there are five major parts, unconditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, neutral stimulus, conditioned stimulus and conditioned response. Before conditioning, they presented some food, which is unconditioned stimulus, in front of the dog. The dog began to salivate, which is unconditioned response. Then they sounded a tone, which is a neutral stimulus. However, this time there is no salivation. During conditioning, they sounded a tone first, and then gave some food to the dog. After many trials, the dog would salivate( conditioned response), when the heard the tone (conditioned stimulus). Neutral stimulus usually causes nothing, but if the unconditioned stimulus is repeatedly presented after neutral stimulus, then neutral stimulus would became conditioned stimulus that cause conditioned response. In this case, researchers always presented some food after sounded a tone, which let the dog associate the tone and the food. Therefore, when it heard the tone, it would think of the food and then began to salivate.

 

classical-conditioning

Theoretically, By giving animals some rewards,  we can teach them many simple things if we have time. If anyone is interested in this, you can definitely try this with your pets.

 

URL:

https://www.psychologistworld.com/behavior/pavlov-dogs-classical-conditioning.php

http://www.simplypsychology.org/pavlov.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Pavlov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning

One thought on “Can animals can do crazy things after training?

  1. Elsa Breakey

    This is so cool! Today I saw a video on Facebook (will attach at the bottom because it was so cute) of a pup getting into the bath by itself, filling up and draining the water, and drying off with a towel before getting into bed. My dog can’t do much more than shake so I thought this was awesome – but dogs that can do math and write?! So cool. I definitely want to try training my dog to do more tricks and human like activities.

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