I’ve always been somewhat sceptical on the concept of jackpotting.  I don’t know why it has never sat well with me – it just seems a bit much to comprehend that dogs can have an understanding of a degree of success.

That being said, my experience does indicate some benefits in jackpotting.  I guess the best description of what I do is ‘mini-jackpotting’.This is what I use when free shaping behaviours, and I reward ‘more successful’ attempts with more food.

Over the last couple of days, I have been training scent identification and indication.  The process was very slow, until I started mini-jackpotting. In this example, my scent was a teabag and I wanted my dog to scratch/dig at the teabag.

Over the session, I was rewarded different interactions in different ways.  My dog would be rewarded with one piece of kibble if the looked at or moved towards the teabag.  I rewarded touching the object with a paw with numerous bits (about 5 pieces). An actual scratch or dig with about 10 pieces.

My dog was very slow at first, but mini-jackpotting seemed to very much speed up the learning process.  There are several reasons that this may be the case…

1. I read once that dogs understand the time of a reward more than the quantity of the reward… i.e. Dogs find it more rewarding to be given 5 treats in a row, one after the other, rather than being given a handful of 5 treats.  So, dogs find a long reward more rewarding. (Unfortunately I don’t recall the source of this suggestion.)  As it takes more time to eat numerous treats, perhaps the dog understands this as more rewarding.
2. Another approach on the time front is that when the dog is eating numerous treats, they are actually having time to think. Perhaps when I reward many-treats at once, the dog has more of an opportunity to think through and the improvements I see towards my target behaviour are actually from this thinking time, rather than the reward itself.
3. The dog might actually understand that if they do x they get more treats than if they do y!

This is the most thought I’ve ever given to ‘mini jackpotting’, and I haven’t been very logical in its implementation.  If this system occurred by accident or subconscious desire to jackpot, I am unsure.  However, I have found it to be quite successful and I would be interested to see if anyone has had similar success.

Further reading: Schedules of Reinforcement