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Its a Dog-Eat-Dog World: Stages of Learning 

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Its a Dog-Eat-Dog World: Stages of Learning 

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At the beginning of the day all the dogs need to be fed and watered. Depending on how many dogs you are in charge of, this can take a long period of time. Giving them water is the easy part becasue they all get the same thing. However, most dogs eat their own food that their owner brought them, so you have to sort through the bags of dog food to find theirs and give them the right amount. This can be very time consuming if not done properly.
When I first began working there it took me a long time to get all the dogs fed, but it did not take long for the feeding time to be shortened. During this time I was in the cognitive stage of learning this task. I tried out many new strategies to be quicker and more efficient. After a couple weeks of trying new strategies for feeding the dogs, I found the one that worked best for me. Once I did this, I got quicker and quicker. This means I entered the Associative stage of learning. My feeding patterns became consistent and accurate and I relied less on verbal cues. I experienced both the Cognitive and Associative stages of learning on this task, but I never got to the Autonomous stage. Maybe if I worked there for many years I would be able to get to this stage but one summer was not long enough for me to get to this stage.
This gif illustrates me when the other employees asked me if I fed this dog yet.

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Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Augmented Feedback

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Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks: Augmented Feedback

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My first day of work at the dog kennel was a training day. I had owned a dog before so I knew many of the basic things to take care of a dog. However, there was much more me to learn still. I followed one of the more experienced employees around that day and they taught me how to perform many of the daily tasks I would be performing everyday. Since I was relatively new to this, I did not exactly know what my actions were supposed to look like so I could not rely on task intrinsic feedback. I had to heavily rely on augmented feedback from the experienced employee to get information about how I was performing the new tasks. Many of the tasks that now seem second nature to me, like cleaning the kennels, letting the dogs out, feeding and watering them, and giving them attention, were new to me and I did not know how to perform them. Luckily for me, I had a "coach" there to give me the feedback I was not getting from myself in order to learn how to perform each task better and more efficiently.
This is a picture illustrates me when I was recieving all that augmented feedback while learning how to take care of all the dogs.

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It's a Dogs World, We're Just Living In It: Dynamic Pattern Theory

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It's a Dogs World, We're Just Living In It: Dynamic Pattern Theory

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Part of my responsibilities at the dog kennel was to take dogs for nature walks. The kennel had nice nature trails through the woods that the dogs loved walking through. Usually, you would have a couple groups of dogs to take on 20 minute walks. Bus as you probably know, not all dogs like to walk at the same pace. Some dogs enjoy a nice stroll by your side enjoying the scenery. Other dogs want to sniff everything and explore the world. Those dogs love to pull you along the trail and keep the lease tight. This often results in you having to either walk a lot faster than comfortable or a slow little jog. Either way it is much less pleasant than a stroll through the woods. When you get two dogs that like to walk fast and pull you along it is even harder!
Walking these exploring dogs can be explained using the Dynamic Pattern Theory. The Dynamic Pattern Theory states that changes in the environment and physical characteristics causes you to go from one stable pattern to another stable pattern. This new stable pattern emerges on its own. The dogs pulling on the leash represent control parameters, which influence the stability. The dogs pulling on the leash cause a nonlinear change in behavior leaving me with the decision to make, change my speed to pull the dogs back to walk at my speed. But as you can probably guess, the dogs always win and I have to speed up my walking.
This gif below illustrates howgetting pulled along by these dogs feels.

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Who Let The Dogs Out: Information Processing

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Who Let The Dogs Out: Information Processing

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While caring for the dogs I had to feed and water them every morning. Also, I had to make sure they had enough water throughout the day. To do this task I had to unlock their kennel, bring in the water pitcher, fill their water bowl and the close the gate and lock it again. However, it was not always that easy. The gate close on their own, so I had to be cautious to not get lock in. To prevent getting locked in, I would usually keep my foot in the way of the door. However, some of the dogs would see this as an escape route. They would take advantage of the open door and wiggle their way out and into the kennel alley. This represents the stimulus identification stage of information processing.
When this would happen, I had to make a decision. Do I finish pouring their water or do I stop them. This represents the response selection stage of information processing.
Usually I would stop the dogs from escaping, which is the response programming stage. I would have to stop pouring the water and block their escape route or grab ahold of them and keep them in their kennel.
Sometimes, when two or more dogs were in a kennel together, it would be much harder to keep them in becasue this presents more selection-response alternatives. Because of the increased S-R alternatives, my reaction time would become slower usually resulting in one of the dogs escaping.
This gif shows how I felt when I would foil a dogs plan to escape their kennel.

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This summer I worked at a dog kennel in Oregon, Wisconsin. It was a wonderful experience because I really love dogs and really enjoyed being around them all day long. The job kept me busy and really helped me learn more about dogs and how to take care of them. There were dogs of all ages and sizes. My favorite were the bigger ones.
During most week days the kennel was not too busy. There were usually four or five of us working there. The kennel had three different sections, usually one person in charge of each section. On weekdays, there were often only a few dogs in each section. These days I could focus my attention to all the dogs in my section and have left over attention to focus on other duties as well. Therefore I could often multitask and get a lot of the tasks done for the day in a timely manner.
However, on Fridays and Saturdays the kennel was super busy. A lot of the time all 130 kennels were full, often with two dogs in a kennel (if the two dogs were from the same owner). During this time, there was so much going on. Dogs are barking, pooping, peeing, spilling their food and water, and you have other tasks to get done as well. There was so much to focus on and often times it was too much. I had to filter things out and focus on the important things. Most of the time I did not have any attention left over to multitask. The attention arousal level was very high sometimes resulting in a lowered attention pool. During these busy times I had to focus my attention in so many places which made it difficult multitask and give my attention to every dog.
The Theories of Attention states that our attention capacity is fixed and if there is left over room we can multitask, but if there are too many tasks there is not enough attention capacity. This pictures represents how I felt trying to give every dog the love and attention it deserved, even though I did not have the attention capacity to do so.