Clarity with Markers

One of the most powerful and quick things that you can do for your performance is to increase the clarity of your communication by cleaning up your markers.  In this lecture we will talk about (1) the power of a clear marker, (2) what are the qualities of an effective marker, (3) use of location specific markers, and (4) why we don’t want to train with “Alert”.

The Power of Clear Marker

Markers, or more accurately called “Secondary Reinforcers”, are a communication system.  They are a way of removing ambiguity in terms of what the handler notices as “correct” and what the dog interprets as “correct”. Markers are the vehicle that enable training criteria to be understood and maintained.  They are also either intentional or unintentional but we will get to that in a moment!

If you have ever trained using a clicker, you have used a marker, or secondary reinforcer.  The click in that case tells the dog that something was correct and that the reinforcement is forthcoming.  The dog doesn’t need to “guess”.  By using the clicker in a consistent way, when hearing the click, the dog learns to anticipate reinforcement (often called “reward” though the two are a bit different…. Please make sure to read the lecture this week on reinforcement).  That anticipation causes all of those nice feelings in the dog’s brain and are the same feelings that they get with the actual reinforcement.  This is important because the sound itself now becomes reinforcement. 

The very cool part of this is that once the dog learns the criteria to earn the marker (which can be a clicker or a verbal sound), that behavior now gets built into the behavior chain with the strength of a reinforcer!  (We will cover containers later in this class… but the implication is that when a dog false alerts on a distraction, a positive connection to the distraction is actually produced…. More on that in a later week!)

The interesting thing though is that no matter what, you are training with a marker, even if you don’t intend to.  Markers (secondary reinforcers) are just a communication that tells the dog that they are correct.  When a clear marker is not intentionally produced by the handler, the dog will seek other sorts of communication that will confirm correctness in order to anticipate the reinforcement.  So if your marker is not clear to the dog, the dog will pick up on your other unintentional communication such as stepping in to the dog, squaring up at the dog with your feet, reaching towards your pocket, even breathing in!  And, since dogs are naturally a non-verbal species, if your marker is not clear, the dog will default to these things instead.  So basically, even if you decide to not use a marker in training, you are training with de facto markers regardless of your intention.

The very best world is when we communicate to the dog both intentionally as well as cleanly so that the dog understands what we mean to convey.  In the world of sport detection, this means that the dog has finished the behavior chain of seeking, finding, and communicating the location of a hide in a way that that they understand that they were successful and experiences all of those feel good chemicals in the brain that are the result of anticipating their reinforcement.  And since the communication what cleanly understood, the dog desires repeating the criteria again the next time.  So in plain English…. When you use a clear marker, your dog will know that they were correct and will try hard to be correct the next time too!

Now, because markers are so powerful, if our communication is muddy or unintentional, we risk the dog learning the wrong criteria.  This means that your dog might start to read your body language and you risk a false alert or alerting too far from source (fringe alert).  Once this gets built into the behavior chain, it can be challenging to fix!

Markers are Powerful.  And because they will be either intentional or unintentional, you can either control and improve your performance, or you can struggle with false and/or fringe alerts.

The Qualities of an Effective Marker

The biggest thing to remember when evaluating your marker is that dogs are NOT a verbal species.  Dogs naturally listen to body language before words.  Therefore, when we use a sound as a marker, it needs to be clear and ideally decoupled from movement.

Also, because dogs are not a verbal species but they are a social species and truly DO care about what you think, praise is enjoyed and is seen as reinforcement, not as communication.  Communication says IF something is correct.  Reinforcement is about pleasure.  Therefore, we need to decouple a marker from praise.  Praise itself also takes time to deliver, so the duration of a period of praise doesn’t give any information about correctness to the dog at any one point in time.  (For instance, does the dog TRULY know WHY they are being reinforced if there is only praise and no communication?)

Communication should be agnostic of emotion.  It’s not praise…. It just “is”.  This means that any sound that is understandable can be used effectively.  But because we need to communication to be precise, the communication needs to be CLEAR and VERY BRIEF.  This is why clickers are so powerful, however clickers require that the handler have fluency in observation, timing, and have the coordination to use the clicker in the moment. Clickers are PRECISE, even more so than short words, so for most handlers, a verbal marker may yield better results.

So in short, you want: (1) a CLEAR AND BRIEF marker, (2) to use the marker without added movement, and (3) to keep your marker separate from praise.

(We will talk later this week about the ideal timing of the marker and how to layer on effective reinforcement.)

Although this is generally an easy and straightforward fix, it can be challenging to handlers to adopt if there is a long history of unclear, inconsistent, or unintentional marker usage.

In this video, I demonstrate effective marker usage with Prize.  As Prize finishes sourcing, you can see that I generally minimize motion and I make a point of not moving in towards Prize.  (I also make sure that my feet don’t square up to her either so that if it’s an odor pool, she can dismiss it… a topic of another lecture later!)  My marker is CLEAR and BRIEF and there is a perceptible pause between my marker and my praise.  (Where I reward is of no consequence in this example because my marker ends the behavior… you do NOT have to feed at source with an effective marker!)

In this video, I purposely demonstrated errors that I frequently see in marker use.  Since I have cleaned up my communication, this felt really awkward!  In this video when Powder started to localize the hide, I started to creep in.  Then when we found the hide, I moved in at the same time as saying “Yeeesssgoodgirl!”  My Yes was stretched out and it combined with praise.  Powder is a very advanced and accomplished dog, however if I used my marker in this fashion for a certain period of time I could expect Powder to start to read my body language and I could expect fringe or false alerts.

Location Specific Markers

We won’t get heavily into Location Specific Markers (LSM’s) however the concept is also very powerful! Location Specific Markers are secondary reinforcers that not only communication if something is “correct” but also what form reinforcement will take.  I tend to train with both food and toys in Nosework (as well as when I am training Prize to be a Wilderness SAR K9) and I have found that I can better manipulate arousal with expectation based on the LSM that I use.  For instance, Prize and Brava both train frequently with a ball as a reward.  True, I can’t trial with it, but I can get A LOT of benefit in reinforcing based on what they value the most.  I have two LSM’s associated with a ball.  “Catch” means that I am chucking the ball at your head so that you can catch it.  “Get It” means that I am throwing the ball far away for you to chase and retrieve it.  In Nosework, I usually use my LSM in place of “Yes”. 

Here is an example video of using “Catch” as a Location Specific Marker with Prize.  In this case I marked after the Look Back. We will talk about timing of the marker in a later lecture this week.

Why we should NOT train using the word “Alert”

Another potential issue I see with handlers is using “Alert” when searching in training, even on known hides.  I think to some extent handlers like to practice saying the correct word.  However, this practice, especially when combined with trialing can create a dog with precision (fringe alert) issues.

Remember that markers can be unintentional, so even if you “don’t use markers”, if you trial, your dog will LEARN that “Alert” is a de facto marker!  So even if you “don’t use markers”, you do use markers.

When we search blind, whether in a trial or in training, we don’t ever TRULY know EXACTLY where the hide is.  In trials, judges are often pretty generous and if the dog COULD be right, you will get a “yes”.  Very often they will give you the benefit of the doubt.  And very often even if the dog IS “correct”, the dog could be “more correct”, which is generally a good training goal.  So when you use “Alert”, odds are you are marking your dog for being off source, even if just a little.  The more you use the word and the more blinds or trialing you do, the more you will shape that off source behavior.  The more you use “Alert”, the more powerful the word as a marker!

So if you want to maintain precision, pick a different marker to use in training.