Evaluating the Effectiveness of Prompting Ration Procedures for Canine Skill Acquistion

Abstract

Prompts are commonly utilized to teach canines novel skills during canine obedience training with the goal of having control of the desired behavior transferred from the prompt to a vocal command. Over prompting or fading prompts too quickly may be detrimental to skill acquisition. To remedy the issue past research has used a prompt to probe method (Mattingly & Bott,1990) to determine when control of the behavior has been transferred from the prompt to the verbal command. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effectiveness of 3 different prompt to probe ratios, 1:1, 3:1, and 5:1, when teaching various skills to canines.