A new training technique based on social learning Social learning means acquiring new behaviours from the observation of others. Recent ethological studies revealed the social cognitive abilities of dogs and demonstrated that they are surprisingly predisposed to learn socially from humans. Do as I do is a new training method based on dog's social cognitive skills, particularly on his imitative ability. With this technique dogs will learn new behaviours observing and imitating of their owners. During the webinar I will describe how to teach dogs the "imitation rule" and how to progress through the training protocol. Dogs will first be taught to imitate a small set of familiar actions (actions already trained with traditional techniques) and will then generalize this rule. At the end of the training protocol, the owner will be able to teach new behaviours to their dogs, simply showing them what to do. These new actions will be then put under verbal cue, as with the traditional training techniques. I will also explain what are the cognitive abilities implied in imitation and in this training techniques which is the first training method based on dog's social cognitive abilities.

Sponsor:dog-ibox
Speaker(s):**Claudia Fugazza

Contact: Corinne Kaelin
 Email: contact@dog-ibox.com
 Web: http://www.dog-ibox.com/webinars