Passive Conditioning
What is passive conditioning? It's a different name for classical conditioning. The most famous example being Pavlov's Dog. For more background on Pavlov and his original experiment, click here (yes, I did just recommend you a Crash Course video, sorry if it brings you any school flash backs!).
Essentially, we are pairing something neutral with an innate reflex behaviour. Therefore, the consequence doesn't influence the behaviour. For example, when a keeper walks past an otter enclosure and they beg for food, regardless of if they've ever met that keeper before or not. The noise of the keepers keys or sight of the uniform shirt (both neutral stimuli) triggers the innate reflex (begging for food).
Initially, the neutral stimulus is incapable of eliciting a behaviour and the animal is not making a voluntary choice to perform the behaviour. It is something that simply happens and over time of the two things being paired, the behaviour is done whenever the stimulus occurs.
Another good example is one pet owners know well. Has your pet ever had a negative experience in a vet office? And the next time you went, did they seem to pre-empt this by growling/hissing/hiding before the vet even touched them? While its a negative we don't want to encourage (and no vet wants to be the bad guy!), its a common example of passive conditioning.
So how can you use it to your advantage when it comes to training? It's a fantastic tool for getting typically flighty individuals or species used to a new antecedent or object. If there's a way to leave the item in an enclosure/night yard/or visual line of a species, they can desensitize themselves over time, and at their own speed. This guarantees you are working at their pace, not pushing boundaries, and keeps your trust bank in tact.
Some examples of this at NZA include:
- Wapiti injection training. The space where the training would take place was chosen to be the walkway between night yard and on-display enclosure, this way Spud walks through it twice a day, every day and becomes naturally comfortable and excited to be in there because passing through means fun and or yummy things at the other end.
- Langur injection training. Our 2 langur boys are what is known as neo-phobic. Aka, they're suspicious and mildly scared of all new things to begin with. To combat this, when the primate team introduced dummy needles, they were stored in the den raceway so the boys could always see them, and become used to them.
- Wallaby voluntary bagging. In order to ask a tammar wallaby to get into a sack for transport, we had to create a platform that could hold open a sack. Initially, just the platform was placed in their enclosure and the boys pellet food was fed on it, this way getting on and being on the platform became routine. Then we even added the bag so the sight of it was no longer scary when we began asking them to enter it.