Clicker Training for Engineers

Our strobe signal is causing the dog to acquire a variety of information from its senses: smell, muscle tension all over the body, auditory, visual, tactile and taste. In order to help the dog sort out which of the data which it acquired is important and which can be ignored we need to understand the principle of signal averaging.

Signal averaging uses the strobe signal to add the acquired data to the data acquired previously. Acquired data generally has noise in it. If the noise is random then it will sometimes add to the information and it will sometimes subtract from the information that is hidden in the data. As more data is acquired the noise will average to zero whereas the informational part of the data will continually increase.

How does this work in training a dog? Perhaps the information we want our dog to acquire is to relax its hind leg muscles when it hears the word "sit." Our click is strobing in not only the hind leg muscle tension but also other environmental and interanal data. Some of the data might be how you look, whether the dog is hungry, what sounds it hears or what smells it smells.

A a trainer it is your responsibility to vary the data that is non-essential to the behavior you are training in such a way that it is random. Each successful execution of the behavior will strengthen the information part of the data and reduce the noise part of the data. If only one training location is used, the location will, by default, become information. Signal averaging requires noise to be random, and in the above situation the training location was not varied and so it did not averaage out.

So here I have utilized the concept of the strobe and signal averaging to explain the use of the clicker and the need for varying the environment during training.