Harry, since he was a kitten, has always banged on slippery surfaces -- door panels and windows, to get them to open so he can go through them. A pretty obvious almost unconditioned behavior.
Recently, in a direct series of shaped behaviors, he's learned that banging on the window gets fresh food in his bowl. That is, we've had a few months of daily behavior where he bangs on the window => it gets opened (by me) => the cold wind in his face drives him back in. I guess the next need to be filled is to eat, so he runs from the window to his food bowl. Since I'm up anyway (physically if not mentally), I have taken to dipping my fingers into his dry food bowl to make sure that there's food there, which makes an appetizing crumbling sound for the cat (which probably gets those saliva glands going, and he's ready to chow). After a while, he appears to have learned that, in order to eat in the morning, he needs to bang the window, which gets me out of bed. All I have to do nowadays is sit up, and he races over to his food bowl and tucks in.
I'm not too fond of this particular learned behavior. And I'll be the first to admit that I'm not sure whose behavior is shaping whose. Stumbling about at 5 a.m. every morning, less than half-awake, I am unwittingly teaching him bad habits.
Anyway, Tasha has never banged. At least, not until this week. And now she has started banging on her own window -- which happens to be the cat door. Lightly whacking on it in quick succession, so it doesn't actually open, it just reverberates with noise. She's only done it twice, and in both instances, her food bowl was entirely empty (and it was about dawn, sorry to say). When I got up and filled it, she ran around the room like a mouse, as if tremendously excited.
And she should be. This is entirely learned behavior, from watching Harry. There is no Unconditioned Stimulus from banging on a window that leads directly to food, so she's leaped directly to the Conditioned Stimulus that banging => more food. Like a rat with a lever, I suppose.
No one else in the house thinks much of it, but I'm thrilled. Not so much with the trials in the pre-dawn hours, but her experimental animal (me) is responsive, so she's well on her way to her feline Ph. D.
2 comments:
Wow, nice, nice example of animal learning!
And evidently, it is as we have always speculated--all learning seems to boil down to negative reinforcement. Harry (and now Natasha) have taught you to get up and feed them by making an irritating sound. You get up to remove the irritating sound, and as a consequence, the sound goes away making it more likely that you will repeat the behavior in the future. I may use this on my second exam!
Such cunning beasts, cats.
How brilliant is that! What a girl. Sorry about the early morning timing, though.
Gomez just mews every 14 seconds until you get up and feed him.
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