PatternTraining

I think I first learned about pattern training from Temple.

Pattern training is a big problem with animals, and also with autistic people . . . but now that I’m trying to teach my son math I realize it’s a huge problem for me, too.

I just didn’t know it.

The best way to understand pattern training is to think about dogs.

Pattern training happens when you always train your dog in the same place at the same time using the same sequence of commands.

The dog learns the pattern, not the individual commands, so he can’t generalize what he knows about sit in the training situation to a whole new situation.

If you ask him to ‘sit’ outside of a training session, he doesn’t know what you’re talking about.

The same thing happens training service dogs.

You can’t just train a dog to cross a corner.

You have to train him to cross lots of different corners, in lots of different places.

Otherwise he only knows how to cross the one corner, and that’s it. Take him to another corner a block away and he’s stumped.

He doesn’t generalize.

This is a huge problem in autism, and it’s the heart of Temple’s & my book, Animals in Translation. Autistic kids don’t generalize well, and neither do animals, and Temple and I argued that this gives autistic people like her unique insight into the behavior of animals.

I believe this is true, but since we wrote the book I think I overestimated just how great we ‘typicals’ are at generalizing.

TO BE CONTINUED





PatternLearning (format shock)
PatternLearningPart2
SummerSupplement

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