Comparison of positive reinforcement training in cats: A pilot study

What’s in a Click? The Efficacy of Conditioned Reinforcement in Applied Animal Training: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Similar to Feng et al [ 108 ], this review also found considerable variation in the number of pairings reported. For example, almost a quarter of the studies implemented a maximum of 20 pairings per day [ 28 ], fewer studies reported on up to 60 pairings per day [ 66 ]. Almost a third of the studies, however, did not report implementing extra pairings prior to the onset of the actual operant training phase [ 76 ].…”

“…Contemporarily, conditioned reinforcement has seen an increase in popularity as a training method since its introduction to a wider animal training audience during the early 1990s—“clicker training” [ 18 , 19 ]. Given its popularity, questions about the effectiveness and efficiency of conditioned reinforcement have become some of the focal points of research in the animal training arena (e.g., [ 9 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 ]). Generally, studies have either investigated the effectiveness of conditioned reinforcement by teaching animals arbitrarily selected responses (e.g., sliding a lid to open a box, touching the top end of a stick or touching a cone, or spins and bows [ 20 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 ]) or used conditioned reinforcement to teach an alternative behavior during a behavior change program or teaching new skills (e.g., touching a target, slipping into a head halter, or releasing a toy on cue [ 4 , 8 , 22 , 23 ]).…”

“…Animals in the experimental groups have been exclusively exposed to pairings of the target stimulus to be conditioned (e.g., beep, clicker, or spoken word) followed by food, while animals in the comparison groups are trained with food only or conditioned reinforcement only (i.e., no pairings between the target stimulus and food are scheduled [ 28 ]). Some of these studies have also investigated resistance to extinction [ 24 , 25 , 26 , 28 , 33 , 34 ], which has been described in the applied and basic research literature as a procedure to demonstrate the relative effectiveness of conditioned reinforcers (i.e., extinction test [ 35 , 36 , 37 ]). In contrast, few studies have investigated the efficiency of clicker training by comparing a continuous pairing of click and food versus an intermittent pairing (for a discussion of these points see [ 38 , 39 ]) or click versus spoken word plus food [ 27 , 29 ].…”

Clicker Training Accelerates Learning of Complex Behaviors but Reduces Discriminative Abilities of Yucatan Miniature Pigs

“…According to some studies [11,12,22], animal trainers consider that dogs trained with a clicker learn more quickly and that a clicker is easier to use to teach behaviors than training with a primary reinforcer alone. However, studies in controlled situations have struggled with finding those mentioned benefits [1,[13][14][15][16]. To compare the efficiency of a clicker and voice, we trained piglets to fetch an object.…”

“…In applied settings, it has been proposed that clicker training can decrease the required time to perform a task and can also help animals be more motivated to work during a training trial [6,7,11,12]. Nevertheless, some studies in dogs, cats, and horses suggest that clicker training does not decrease training time compared to other SRs or a primary reinforcer alone [1,[13][14][15][16]. On the other hand, one study showed that using a sound as SR in dwarf goats (Capra hircus) resulted in higher rates of task acquisition compared to animals trained with a primary reinforcer alone [17].…”