Karen Pryor as soon as 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 concerned) and, most spectacular, her mom to cease complaining on the telephone.
Ms. Pryor, whose expertise as a dolphin coach confirmed her how optimistic reinforcement might be used to coach nearly any animal, together with horses, canines, cats and other people, died on Jan. 4 at a reminiscence care facility in Santa Clarita, Calif. She was 92.
Her daughter, Gale Pryor, stated the trigger was dementia.
Ms. Pryor was a naturalist by nature, however she had not deliberate on a profession as a dolphin coach. She was an English main whose husband, a poet and helicopter pilot turned marine biologist, constructed the primary marine park in Hawaii. Three months earlier than it was set to open in 1964, the dolphins chosen to be the celebrities had confounded their trainers by not studying the tips deliberate for them. As an alternative, they’d taught their exhausted handlers to provide them treats for nothing.
The behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner had begun experiments with folks and animals within the late Thirties, utilizing optimistic reinforcement — what he known as operant conditioning — as a technique to elicit optimistic behaviors. (He famously taught a rat to spend cash and a pair of pigeons to play Ping-Pong.) His rules had knowledgeable the nascent subject of marine mammal coaching.
The crew at Sea Life, the Pryors’ soon-to-be-opened park, had been given a guide primarily based on these rules. However the trainers had gotten slowed down within the scientific jargon. So Ms. Pryor took over.
She realized the class of the method, which includes ready for a desired conduct — leaping, say, or retrieving an object — after which rewarding it with a deal with. (That might be a fish, for those who’re a dolphin.) She realized about conditioned reinforcers: utilizing a sign — a whistle, a hand motion, a clicker — to herald {that a} reward was on its approach, after which utilizing that sign to refine or form a conduct or sequence of behaviors.
A number of the animals she skilled started to improvise, just like the otter who did marvelous issues with a hoop. She had skilled it merely to swim by means of the ring, however its improvements included mendacity down on it, swimming backward by means of it, and catching it on its hind legs and dragging it round. (Otters wish to experiment.) When this one displayed its feats earlier than a gaggle of visiting psychologists, they have been surprised.
“Wonderful,” stated one, Ms. Pryor wrote in “Lads Earlier than the Wind: Adventures in Porpoise Coaching” (1975). “It takes me 4 years to get graduate college students to assume like that.”
The creatures at Sea Life Park — an enticing solid of people with distinctive quirks and pursuits — not solely appeared to get pleasure from their work; additionally they turned expert academics themselves, coaching the people to speak with them extra successfully. However Ms. Pryor was no sentimentalist, as she instructed Natalie Angier of The New York Instances in 1992:
“All people who’s achieved analysis within the subject is uninterested in dolphin lovers who consider these creatures are floating hobbits. A dolphin is a wholesome social mammal, and it behaves like one, together with doing issues that we don’t discover significantly charming.”
Sea Life Park had been designed as a marine park and a analysis middle overseen by Kenneth Norris, a famous marine mammal knowledgeable. Ms. Pryor and her cadre of trainers and dolphins started to take part in research Dr. Norris was conducting, together with for the Navy. They examined the bounds of dolphin velocity. They measured how deep the dolphins might dive. Years later, as a advisor to the tuna trade together with Dr. Norris, Ms. Pryor provided suggestions for designing nets so dolphins wouldn’t be caught in them.
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan appointed Ms. Pryor to the Marine Mammal Fee.
The naturalist Konrad Lorenz got here to watch the work at Sea Life Park. So did B.F. Skinner, whose daughter, Deborah, stayed on as a coach. The social scientist Gregory Bateson spent eight years there observing how dolphins talk.
“Lads Earlier than the Wind,” revealed in 1975, was Ms. Pryor’s account of her adventures there. But it surely was her third guide — her first was “Nursing Your Child” (1963), a guide on easy methods to nurse people — that made her identify.
“Don’t Shoot the Canine! The New Artwork of Instructing and Coaching,” first revealed in 1984, laid out the rules of optimistic reinforcement. It was each prescriptive and profound.
Ms. Pryor’s remedy for her mom’s telephone habits concerned a observe known as extinction. She stayed silent in the course of the recitation of woes. But when her mom stopped ranting to inquire about Ms. Pryor’s kids or supply a benign remark, she would reply with enthusiasm. Inside weeks, the complaining conduct had been extinguished.
She wrote of how nagging, like different unfavourable reinforcements, solely reinforces the nagger’s tendency to nag extra; hardly ever does it elicit any optimistic response within the naggee. This tendency, she famous, turns into extra pronounced in additional excessive conduct modifications, like beating a baby or whipping a horse. Worry will modify the conduct in each creatures. The kid or horse shall be cowed to obedience, and the punisher shall be emboldened to proceed his or her corrosive methods.
Optimistic reinforcement, she wrote, is against this a technique of give and take: “One turns into extra conscious of others, and, inevitably, extra conscious of oneself.”
Karen Liane Wylie was born on Could 14, 1932, in Manhattan, the one little one of Sally Ondek, a trend mannequin, and the writer Philip Wylie, whose best-selling 1943 essay assortment, “Technology of Vipers,” excoriated trendy life and included a satirical piece about what he known as the cult of mom worship in American society.
Karen grew up in Connecticut and Miami and was a born naturalist — the type of little one, her daughter stated, who all the time had a frog in her pocket. Along with her father, she realized to snorkel and dive. At Cornell College, she wished to main in ornithology however was instructed that girls couldn’t be accepted in this system as a result of there was no place for them to go to the lavatory within the woods.
She selected English as a substitute, however she additionally took each pure historical past course she might. She stored a fish tank in her sorority, which intrigued a fellow scholar, a artistic writing main named Taylor Allderdice Pryor, generally known as Faucet, who was additionally ocean obsessed. They married in 1954.
Mr. Pryor enlisted within the Marines, skilled to be a helicopter pilot and was posted to Oahu. By then the Pryors had three kids and have been elevating pheasants to pay the payments, and Mr. Pryor had determined to grow to be a marine biologist. He was learning sharks, however there was no place in Hawaii with a tank sufficiently big to maintain them. So he determined to construct a marine park — a reasonably novel concept within the early Nineteen Sixties, when there have been just a few on the mainland — and mix it with a analysis middle.
The Pryors offered Sea Life in 1971 and divorced the subsequent yr. In 1983, Ms. Pryor married Jon Lindbergh, a deep sea diver and salmon farmer who was a son of the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh. They divorced within the mid-Nineteen Nineties.
Along with her daughter, Ms. Pryor is survived by two sons, Tedmund and Michael; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
“She was a pioneer within the marine mammal coaching world,” Ken Ramirez, the previous govt vp of animal care and animal coaching at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, stated in an interview. “Within the ’70s, behavioral psychology, or utilized behavioral evaluation, the science we now use to coach marine mammals, was targeted on folks, kids with studying disabilities, autistic kids. Karen was an outlier, amongst a small variety of others, who have been focused on refining Skinner’s research and utilizing them for animal coaching.”
Within the many years after “Don’t Shoot the Canine!” was revealed, Ms. Pryor held workshops for people, together with pilots, fishermen and surgeons, utilizing clickers as indicators to assist them carry out duties extra effectively. But it surely was canines that basically took to clicker coaching. Ms. Pryor didn’t invent the observe, however she helped popularize and refine it, with conferences and an academy for canine trainers.
“A lot of canine coaching is nonetheless about dominance,” stated Annie Grossman, the writer of “Learn how to Practice Your Canine With Love and Science” (2024). “It’s how we’re handled, and so we deal with our canines that approach. The genius of Karen Pryor is that she confirmed it doesn’t need to be.”
When Ms. Pryor wrote the primary version of “Don’t Shoot the Canine!” — it’s nonetheless in print at the moment — she famous that whereas the time period “optimistic reinforcement” had seeped into the tradition, she noticed few examples of it being put into observe.
“In truth,” she wrote, “most individuals don’t perceive it, or they’d not behave so badly to the folks round them.”