For years people thought cats couldn’t be trained, but we’re constantly training our cats whether we’re doing it intentionally or not. Cats learn in a variety of ways, but it can get really complicated understanding all the forces that affect your cat’s behavior. I’m breaking it down into smaller pieces with practical examples to help you understand how cats learn. Today we’re covering one learning process called conditioning.
What Is Conditioning?
You may have heard the term conditioning before, especially if you’ve ever taken an introductory psychology course or read an introductory psychology book. While that course may have focused on humans, the basic concept is the same across species.
Conditioning may sound intimidating, but it’s really just the process of an animal changing their reaction to things in their environment based on past experiences. These things may be people, other cats, places, sounds… Anything the cat has the ability to perceive!
Conditioning can also occur due to things happening inside your cat. The most straightforward example of this is a cat experiencing pain and associating that pain with something they did. It may not have actually caused the pain the cat is experiencing, but they become conditioned to associate the behavior with pain.
For example, I occasionally see cats not using the litter box because they develop an aversion to it while sick. They may be feeling better, but they become conditioned to associate the litter box with pain. The result? Cleaning a lot of cat urine off your floor.
Conditioning in cats happens all the time in cats based on what they encounter in their day to day life. A few examples of conditioning occurring in cats:
- You adopt a new cat. Because you read Class Act Cats’ blog and know that cats should be fed more than twice per day, you feed your cat in the same location 4 times per day. After a few days of you feeding your cat in that location, your cat begins going to that location when it is mealtime. Your cat may also camp out near an automatic feeder.
- Two of your cats are in your kitchen when you are putting away dishes. Someone unexpectedly loudly knocks at your door, causing you to drop a frying pan with a loud clank. One cat is looking at the other cat when it happens. They begin hissing until your second cat leaves the room. The next time they see each other, your cats are afraid of each other. They hiss and growl at each other.
- You’ve been really stressed at work so haven’t played with your cat in a week. Because your cat is bored, they jump on your counter to see if they can find something interesting to do. You yell at them, but your cat is happy you’re finally paying attention to them. They jump on your counter again and you spray them with a spray bottle. What fun! Your cat continues to jump on the counter more and more.
These are examples of different types of conditioning and illustrate that conditioning can occur differently than how you’d expect it to. Let’s talk about what’s happening in more detail.
What Is Classical Conditioning?
We can divide conditioning into different categories depending on how the cats’ behavior changes or how their response changes. In the examples I just gave, I focused a bit more on behavior. However, in the second example with the pan being dropped, I mentioned the cats being fearful of each other. That fear response is an example of classical conditioning.
Classical conditioning refers to a change in an involuntary response in the cat. Typically, this would be an emotional response, but it may also be a physiological reaction. A ~classic~ example (pun absolutely intended) is Pavlov’s dogs: Ivan Pavlov, a physiologist, rang a bell before feeding his dogs and noted that they responded by drooling to the sound of the bell alone. Because drooling is an involuntary response, this is considered classical conditioning as the dogs weren’t intentionally drooling in response to the bell. They just started doing it based on past experience.
Lusvardi’s Cat
You can absolutely see the same response in cats. Actually, I’ve experienced it with my own cat, Prozac! Let’s refer to him as Lusvardi’s cat because I want to be cool enough to have a famous psychology experiment named after me.
Prozac drools when he gets really excited about things including when I pet him (if he wants to be petted). It’s something he’s always kind of done so the drooling in response to petting (for this example) isn’t a conditioned response. However, Prozac comes to get pets with me most nights after I get into bed. He’ll purr and drool and shove himself into me until I give him the good scratches.
I noticed a while back that the drooling started prior to me even petting him as he’ll jump on bed and already be slobbering all over me. Drooling is involuntary so it’s a great example of classical conditioning: Prozac jumps on the bed with me on it and he starts drooling because he associates being on the bed with petting. He already is in a good mood (which is another involuntary response) before I even pet him so he drools!
You’ll notice that it’s not the jumping on the bed that is the classically conditioned response. That’s a different type of conditioning which, conveniently, is what we’re talking about next!
What Is Operant Conditioning?
In the previous example, Prozac learned to jump on my bed to get attention, pets, and be told what a sweet face he has when I get into bed. The drooling was classical conditioning, but the jumping on the bed is a voluntary behavior. Prozac chooses to jump on the bed to come get worshiped by me (and sometimes Poutine) so this would fall under the umbrella of operant conditioning.
Operant conditioning just means a voluntary behavior is changed in response to something. In this example, the behavior (jumping on the bed) is more likely to happen because Prozac loves it. Operant conditioning also occurs when a behavior happens less frequently so it includes a cat learning to avoid doing a particular behavior. We subdivide operant conditioning into different categories based on what causes change and how the behavior changes, but it’s always referring to a voluntary behavior.
Reinforcement vs. Punishment
Depending on how a specific voluntary behavior changes, we may say the behavior was reinforced or punished. These don’t have any sort of moral implications (which cats don’t care about anyway) and the cat’s response is categorized entirely based on the change in behavior:
- If the behavior increases, we say whatever happened to the cat reinforced the behavior or that reinforcement happened.
- If the behavior decreases, we say it was punished or that punishment occurred.
Notice that I mentioned that the behavior change determines if it is punishment or reinforcement. In the third example I gave earlier, you probably intended to decrease the behavior of your cat jumping on the counter by yelling or squirting your cat with water. Because the cat jumped on the counter more, reinforcement was what actually happened. Your intention is irrelevant in this situation.
Positive vs. Negative
We can further subdivide punishment and reinforcement into two more categories: positive and negative.
Once again, these have nothing to do with morality or intention. They also don’t mean good or bad. They’re referring to whatever happened to the cat and whether something was added or removed.
- Positive means something was added.
- In positive reinforcement (such as Prozac getting pets and jumping on my bed more frequently), something is added that the cat likes and the behavior increases.
- In positive punishment (such as using a shock collar on your which is absolutely not a good idea and a behavior decreasing), that is positive punishment.
- Negative means something was removed.
- Negative reinforcement means something was removed and the behavior happened more frequently. A great example of negative reinforcement actually happens with you: if your cat meows until you feed them, you are more likely to feed them to stop the meowing. That’s negative reinforcement from your perspective.
- Negative punishment means something was removed that the cat likes so they do a behavior less frequently. An example of this would be if you stop playing with a cat’s favorite toy if they bite you instead of the toy. If the cat bites you less while playing, that’s negative punishment.
We sometimes refer to these as the four quadrants. They all happen naturally during the course of a cat’s day, but we can also use them as part of cat training or behavior modification to intentionally change behavior. They all can work, but that doesn’t mean we should intentionally use all of them. I don’t use positive punishment with clients’ cats because it’s really not needed if you know what you’re doing. There are also ethical considerations as it relies on causing the cat stress, pain, fear, or other unpleasant things in order to work.
If you’re interested in learning more about each quadrant, I have a separate post on each of them in the works so stay tuned!
Are Classic And Operant Conditioning The Same?
Hopefully you have a good fundamental understanding of conditioning as it’s one of the basic ways cats learn. For those who want something deeper to think about, look at the second example I gave earlier. You’ll notice that both the cat’s emotional response to the other cat and their behavior changed in that example. Both classical and operant conditioning occurred at the same time.
Some people think that dividing conditioning into classical and operant conditioning isn’t a fully accurate reflection of what’s really going on as they often occur simultaneously. The simplest way of thinking of this is that an emotional response leads to the behavior change we see so they may not be completely independent processes. That doesn’t mean they’re the same thing, but that they may overlap a lot more than we’ve traditionally thought.
This is beyond today’s basic introduction to conditioning (and I have mixed thoughts on it), but it has a practical implication: it’s really hard to separate voluntary and involuntary responses. You can’t focus only on the voluntary behavior as involuntary emotional change is happening at the same time. Ignoring your cat’s perspective is only going to lead to ineffective training, poor welfare for your cat, and potentially a damaged relationship with your cat.
