Lately I have been hearing a lot about this clicker training. It seems that if you can get your parent to use a small plastic device that makes a clicking sound when pressed,  you might be able to train your parents to give you a treat. This sounded fascinating to me. My parents seem pretty smart, so I thought I would look into this clicker training.

When I asked Bad Kitty what he knew about clicker training, this is what he told me.

Clicker training is essentially the same as operant conditioning. Operant conditioning, sometimes called instrumental conditioning, is a method for modifying behavior, an operant, which uses contingencies between a discriminative stimulus, an operant response, and a reinforcer to change the probability of a response occurring again in that situation. This method is based on the behavioral scientist B.F. Skinner’s three-term contingency.

Skinner believed that, in order to experimentally analyze human and cat behavior, each behavioral act can be broken down into three key parts.

These three parts  also known as Skinner’s three-term-contingency are:

1. Discriminative Stimulus– what influences the occurrence of an operant response.
2. Operant Response- a behavior that is modifiable by its consequences.  Reinforcement increases the probability of  that behavior occurring again.
3. Reinforcement- a consequence that follows an operant response that increases the likelihood of that response  occurring in the future.

Whoa! My eyes were starting to glaze over just a bit when Bad Kitty was talking.

When I asked Lazy Leopard what he knew about clicker training, this is what he told me:

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