How quickly you learn something depends on whether your brain thinks that this knowledge is to avoid something bad (slow learning) or to attain something good (fast learning).
Aversive learning is slower than appetitive learning? That’s possible, but not what I would expect from my reading on anxiety and learned aversions, which can often be traced back to a single traumatic incident. Maybe this is just selection bias (EDIT: It was.), or the relative amount of badness is incomparable, but that seems like those results ought to get reconciled somehow.
The animal training book Don’t Shoot the Dog states that reinforcement-oriented clicker training is substantially faster and more persistent than aversion-based alternatives. Even for cases where you’re training an animal not to do something, the author recommends finding a way to make use of reinforcement-based training somehow… e.g. train a behavior incompatible with the one you want to discourage. “[Punishment is] everybody’s favorite [method for getting rid of undesired behaviors], in spite of the fact that it almost never really works.”
The animal training book Don’t Shoot the Dog states that reinforcement-oriented clicker training is substantially faster and more persistent than aversion-based alternatives.
Oh, of course. Positive reinforcement in general is stronger, which I would have noticed if I hadn’t been primed by reading about anxiety recently, which suggests I should institute some sort of debiasing exercise when I recognize the risk of selection bias rather than just announcing it.
Aversive learning is slower than appetitive learning? That’s possible, but not what I would expect from my reading on anxiety and learned aversions, which can often be traced back to a single traumatic incident. Maybe this is just selection bias (EDIT: It was.), or the relative amount of badness is incomparable, but that seems like those results ought to get reconciled somehow.
The animal training book Don’t Shoot the Dog states that reinforcement-oriented clicker training is substantially faster and more persistent than aversion-based alternatives. Even for cases where you’re training an animal not to do something, the author recommends finding a way to make use of reinforcement-based training somehow… e.g. train a behavior incompatible with the one you want to discourage. “[Punishment is] everybody’s favorite [method for getting rid of undesired behaviors], in spite of the fact that it almost never really works.”
Oh, of course. Positive reinforcement in general is stronger, which I would have noticed if I hadn’t been primed by reading about anxiety recently, which suggests I should institute some sort of debiasing exercise when I recognize the risk of selection bias rather than just announcing it.