slot paraiso Karen Pryor, Guru of Positive Reinforcement, Is Dead at 92

Karen Pryor once taught a hermit crab to ring a bell by pulling a string with its claw. She taught a cat to play the piano (ham was involved) and, most impressive, her mother to stop complaining on the phone.

Ms. Pryor, whose experience as a dolphin trainer showed her how positive reinforcement could be used to train just about any animal, including horses, dogs, cats and people, died on Jan. 4 at a memory care facility in Santa Clarita, Calif. She was 92. Her daughter, Gale Pryor, said the cause was dementia.

Ms. Pryor was a naturalist by nature, but she had not planned on a career as a dolphin trainer. She was an English major whose husband, a poet and helicopter pilot turned marine biologist, built the first marine park in Hawaii. Three months before it was set to open in 1964, the dolphins chosen to be the stars had confounded their trainers by not learning the tricks planned for them. Instead, they had taught those exhausted handlers to give them treats for nothing.

The behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner had begun experiments with people and animals in the late 1930s,swerte99 casino using positive reinforcement — what he called operant conditioning — as a way to elicit positive behaviors. (He famously taught a rat to spend money and a pair of pigeons to play Ping-Pong.) His principles had informed the nascent field of marine mammal training.

The crew at Sea Life, the Pryors’ soon-to-be-opened park, had been given a manual based on those principles. But the trainers had gotten bogged down in the scientific jargon. So Ms. Pryor took over.

She learned the elegance of the technique, which involves waiting for a desired behavior — jumping, say, or retrieving an object — and then rewarding it with a treat. (That would be a fish, if you’re a dolphin.) She learned about conditioned reinforcers: using a signal — a whistle, a hand movement, a clicker — to herald that a reward was on its way, and then using that signal to refine or shape a behavior or series of behaviors.

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