Welcome to drinking from the toilet.

If you're looking for a real discussion about the science and reality of training with positive reinforcement,

well, then you've come to the right place. I'm your host, Hannah Branigan.

Today's episode builds directly off of last week, which was episode 40, on motivating operations.

So if you haven't listened to that one yet, stop right now. Go back and listen to that one first.

I think we'll make a lot more sense if you have the context for that, especially the definitions of some of the words that we're going to be

using and those explanations. Of course, it's still a free country, so I can't control you,

and I have no recourse if you decide to go rogue and listen to these out of order. So,

you know what, do what the heck you want. But just in case, how about a brief review? So last week, we talked about how motivating operations

describe how the context and circumstances that you're in can change how valuable a reinforcer

is to you in that moment. And sometimes it's an obvious biological relationship that doesn't require

any learning at all. If you're hungry, food is more reinforcing to you than when you're not hungry.

If you are feeling nauseous, though, then food is a lot less valuable. Food's a lot less reinforcing

in that moment. And also, sometimes motivating operations can be learned. They can develop as a result

of an individual's learning history. And we call those conditioned motivating operations because,

of course, conditioning and learning are used sort of as interchangeable terms when we're talking

about behavior stuff. So associations over time with things that

happen to you change how you feel about a reinforcer in different contexts. And this week,

we're going to zoom in on one particular type of conditioned motivating operation, the learn kind,

and that is the reflexive version or the CMOR, so reflexive CMOR, which I think is really especially

relevant to us in helping us troubleshoot some of our training problems.

And I think this is going to be pretty valuable.

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