Behavior - The activities of an organism, both overt, or observable, and covert, or hidden such as thinking.

Behavior Therapy - Concentrates on eliminating the symptoms of personality conflict, which are regarded as conditioned responses, through counter conditioning.

Classical Conditioning - The learning process through which a reflex becomes attached to a conditioned stimulus.

Conditioned Operant - Behavior learned through operant conditioning; a type of behavior with which the organism "operates" on its environment to obtain a desired result.

Counter-Conditioning Techniques - Involves the substitution of a new behavior in place of the unwanted response, which can be extinguished through counter-conditioning techniques.

Example: When the door bell rings, and your dog starts his charge towards the front door, you may want to extinguish the charging problem and substitute a new behavior in its place. What you can do is teach the dog when he hears the bell ring, which is the triggering device, he's to go and lay down in a well defined area called his place.

Extinction - The disappearance of a conditioned reflex or other learned behavior when reinforcement is withdrawn.

Flooding Techniques - Force training - Taking the dog directly into a situation to re-create the conditioned response and correcting him.

Instinct - An elaborate and inborn pattern of activity, occurring automatically and without prior learning in response to certain stimuli in the environment.

Learning Rate - Relates to how many patterning experiences or repetitions are necessary for an animal to acquire a habit. Related factors include age, personality, stress level, and problem solving abilities.

What does this indicate to you as a trainer? What does this mean to you as the dog's owner? Training programs need to be designed to fit each dog's unique genetic make up and learning abilities.

Negative Transfer - A process in which learning is made more difficult by interference from previous learning.

Operant Avoidance - Behavior, learned through operant conditioning, by which the organism attempts to avoid something unpleasant.

Operant Behavior - Behavior that is not initially associated with or normally elicited by a specific stimulus.

Operant Conditioning - The process by which, through learning, free operant behavior becomes attached to a specific stimulus.

Performance - Performance requires not only the actual learning, (operant conditioning) but also a motive to perform, (reward) and the absence of conflicting behaviors such as nervousness or anxiety, which inhibits the animal's capabilities to concentrate and perform.

Positive Transfer - A process in which learning is made easier by something learned previously.

Primary Reinforcement - Reinforcement provided by a stimulus that the organism finds inherently rewarding - usually stimuli that satisfy biological drives such as hunger or thirst.

Reinforcement - In classical conditioning, the pairing of an unconditioned stimulus such as sound with a conditioned stimulus such as food. In general, the process of assisting learning by pairing desired behavior with something that the organism finds rewarding.

Reinforcing Stimulus - The stimulus used in reinforcement; anything that strengthens and induces repetition of behavior in learning.

Respondent Behavior - Behavior that is a response to a definite stimulus.

Response - Any kind of behavior the results from a stimulus.

Shaping - The learning of complicated tasks through operant conditioning, in which complex actions are built up from simpler ones.