In Virtual Dog Training, professional trainer Gary Wilkes shows Alan the "clicker" method for conditioning his own dog, Tug; a method which Bruce Blumberg at MIT was so intrigued by he chose to use it with his own virtual dog, Duncan. Below, Wilkes explains that knowing what matters to a dog and just how to respond can make all the difference in successful training.
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What is Clicker Training?
by Gary Wilkes

Plainly stated, clicker training assumes that to learn or perform behaviors, an animal must have enough information to know what to do and enough motivation to actually do it. From this perspective, a trainer must understand how to give precise information to an animal that doesn't speak human language and cannot benefit from detailed instructions. If this sounds like an insurmountable task, you might be surprised to learn that transferring information audibly without using language is actually quite common. If you think it's something we all learned in school, you are getting warmer. If you think it was something academic, you are getting colder. If you think it had something to do with a childhood game, you're red hot.

Most children play a game called "hot/cold." The object of the game is to guide a player to a hidden object by blurting out the words "hot" or "cold" depending on the player's movements. Hot indicates that the player is headed toward the object, while cold indicates movement in the wrong direction. These two signals compose the foundation for the information side of our equation. Using only "hot/cold", the player can quickly gain enough information to discover the location of the object. To pass information from one person to another, the game reduces communication to very basic principles. The two signals used in the game provide two simple pieces of information -- Right Path vs. Wrong Path.
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