We’re talking with Dr Susan Friedman about schedules of reinforcement. Susan is a professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Utah State University. She is well known around the world for her very popular on-line course: How Behavior Works: Living & Learning With Animals). She has co-authored chapters on behavior change in five veterinary texts, and her popular articles have been translated into 17 languages. She shares many of those articles on her web site: behavior works.org. It’s a great resource for all of us who want to learn more about the natural science of behavior.

Susan is a member of the clicker expo faculty. Her presentations at the March Clicker Expo prompted this conversation on schedules of reinforcement.

In Part 1 Susan reviewed with us the basics of fixed and variable schedules. She ended with a question about how you get behavior to vary when you are using a continuous reinforcement schedule. That’s where we began in Part 2.

In Part 2 we took a deeper dive into continuous reinforcement schedules. We considered how you get behavior to vary without using a variable reinforcement schedule. Susan talked about a moving away from transactional training to training with assent.

Part 3 Susan helps us to understand schedules of co-variation. She defines conjugate and synchronous schedules and gives some very practical examples, especially as it relates to husbandry procedures that may involve some discomfort. Again she discusses what assent looks like and what it means when an animal says no. What conditions must be present for a conjugate schedule to begin and what conditions mean that the training should stop?