{"id":7419,"date":"2024-03-28T14:33:17","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T13:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/?p=7419"},"modified":"2024-12-30T21:53:40","modified_gmt":"2024-12-30T20:53:40","slug":"matching-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/matching-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Matching Law"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Many of the chapters of my <a href=\"https:\/\/illis.se\/education\/courses\/advanced-animal-training\/\">Advanced Animal Training course<\/a> don&#8217;t lend themselves to be published as a stand-alone blog posts, since they build on each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the chapter below, discussing the Matching Law, does! <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Matching Law implies that animals (and humans) will do more of the behaviour that leads to the most favoured outcome, but they <em>will keep offering the other, less well reinforced behaviour too, <\/em>at least sometimes. Matching is affected by reinforcer quality, rate&nbsp; and delay of reinforcement \u2013 and response effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p><em>Click the CC button at the bottom right of the video for subtitles. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-vimeo wp-block-embed-vimeo\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/274770940?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"580\" height=\"435\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The term <em>bold shaping<\/em> is something I have discussed earlier in the course &#8211; it essentially means that as we&#8217;re shaping a novel behaviour, we minimize the number of repetitions of unfinished versions of the behaviour as we&#8217;re climbing that shaping staircase. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eileen Anderson writes about how she sees the Matching Law play out in how her dogs&nbsp;<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/eileenanddogs.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/28\/dog-food-toys-rates-of-reinforcement-matching-law\/\" target=\"_blank\">choose to interact with food toys<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You may think: what about Contrafreeloading and the Matching Law? Aren\u2019t these two phenomena contradictory?(Contrafreeloading, you may recall, is when an animal chooses to work for food even though the same food is available for free, a robust phenomenon seen in many species (except, apparently, cats) \u2013 seemingly a violation of the Matching Law). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, it seems to me that what occurs during contrafreeloading is that another reinforcement system takes precedence. Rather than just preferentially choosing the least energetically demanding option to get the calories, the animal is choosing the option that involves a degree of work, because it stimulates the <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/seeking\/\" target=\"_blank\">SEEKING<\/a> system (a core emotion) which is reinforcing in and of itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, when choosing between SEEKING and no-SEEKING, the choice is SEEKING: work over no work \u2013 contrafreeloading. But I would expect that when choosing between SEEKING with a low work\/reward ratio or SEEKING with a high work\/reward ratio, Matching Law kicks in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>***<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The chapter above is from the module Schedules of Reinforcement from the Advanced Animal Training (AAT) course that opens for enrollment every year in April. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Interested in the learning more about the AAT course? Sign up below and I&#8217;ll let you know when it opens for admission! I&#8217;ll also keep you posted on blog posts,&nbsp; free webinars and masterclasses, silly experiments and my other online courses &#8211; all about animal behaviour, learning and wellbeing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><b><\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many of the chapters of my Advanced Animal Training course don&#8217;t lend themselves to be published as a stand-alone blog posts, since they build on each other. But the chapter below, discussing the Matching Law, does! *** Matching Law implies that animals (and humans) will do more of the behaviour that leads to the most [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,21],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7419"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7809,"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7419\/revisions\/7809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illis.se\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}