The Poisoned Cue

Karen Pryor coined the term “poisoned cue”. She commented that behavior analysts can easily set up experiments that look at pure positive or pure negative reinforcement. But Karen said that’s not the real world. The real world is filled with mixed consequences. What happens when a cue can lead to good things happening or to bad things happening but you don’t know which it is going to be? That’s the poisoned cue. Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz explored this question in a study he conducted with one of his graduate students at the University of North Texas. In this podcast Dominique Day and Alexandra Kurland describe his findings and discuss how this relates to horse training.