Spatial Pressure and Spatial Positioning

Spatial Positioning or Spatial Pressure. What Is It and How To Use It

This article is a continuation of the ideas found in my book “Dog Training Strategies, Tactics, and Personal Insight.”

Spatial Pressure is part of what I always called Spatial Positioning. As with most things dog training, I have a little different take on Spatial Pressure and Positioning. First is that I may be looking at it a little differently than others. I am asking different questions. I classify Spatial Positioning within the realm of communication. I go over several components involved in Spatial Positioning in chapter 5 of my book “Dog Training, Strategies, Tactics, and Personal Insights.” That would be the chapter about communication.

Appeasement, Avoidance, and Approach Behavior

Primarily I am interested in how the social pressure of positioning affects the dog’s appeasement, avoidance, and approach responses. Here appeasement as well as certain types of avoidance can show up as some type of compliance. Spatial positioning can be used to get the dog to move away from or toward the handler. It can also be used to push or pull the dog into one or the other when there is a summation of the two. That is when avoidance and approach responses are competing with each other. I look at spatial positioning as a component of social pressure. This makes Spatial Pressure closely associated with social pressure. Traditionally, I use the term social pressure more broadly and spatial pressure more narrowly. In the future I may start using the term spatial pressure more freely.

Components of Spatial Pressure

Spatial Positioning can be used to increase and/or decrease social pressure. The combination of Spatial Positioning, movement, proximity, context, location, temperament, social relationships, and timing are all components of spatial pressure.

Standard Interaction Distances

Proximity or distance is an important element to spatial pressure. How distance affects social pressure can vary by location. Social relationships, temperament, and experience as well as other variables. Experience allows each individual some degree of predicting the effect of social proximity. A good place to start with how distance affects social pressure is considering how distance has been used and described by both Heini Hediger and Edward T. Hall. I have observed and used both models of distance at one time or another. I think dogs as well as people display both in varying degrees, depending on location, context, and how they orient to the opportunity or threat.

Heini Hediger’s Interaction Distances

Heini Hediger was a Swiss biologist who described a number of standard interaction distances. These included flight distance, defense distance, critical distance, and their is also personal distance, and social distance. To this list I think we need to also add orientation distance. The orientation response can be important in several types of dog training and has varying uses determined by the training objectives.

Edward T. Hall’s Proxemics

Edward T. Hall adapted Hediger’s animal interaction distances and applied them to humans’. He viewed the use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture. The term he used for this is Proxemics and it was directed specifically toward humans, not animals. However, since humans are half of the human/dog experience, I am including it here. Hall broke distance into personal space which includes intimate distance and personal distance, social space which equals social distance but outside of personal distance, and public space (public distance.) While human interaction distances are shaped by culture, there is still a more animal-like sense of distance laying under the surface, dormant until needed. If you do any kind of face to face intrusive interaction with large numbers of people you will start to observe certain patterns of behavior related to distance. Some are cultural and some seem to be more primitive. Often there are what look like cultural patterns that overlay more primitive animal patterns.

Spatial Pressure is a useful Instructional Heuristic.

As I think about it, Spatial Pressure is a useful instructional term for teaching handling skills. Even if I don’t always think of its many components as a single variable, it can be a useful dog training term. Much like the psychohydraulic model of behavior in protection dog training. I have to mention, there do seem to be papers published to make the psychohydraulic model for motivation model more usable. However, I tend to approach dog behavior leaning more toward applied behavior analysis.

Spatial Pressure vs Spatial Positioning

Spatial Pressure is more descriptive than spatial positioning and social pressure in that it combines several components into one idea. In addition it’s more expansive than how I think of spatial pressure, which is the psychological pressure of being in a certain type of space. This is often a confined space. But, it could also be a new kind of space, or where escape/security is uncertain. Since spatial pressure is being used more and more in the dog training lexicon, I may start calling the added stress of confined areas, spatial stress. Where I see spatial stress most often is when teaching the heel position with a food lure.

In this image I am doing a fast transient from facing the dog squarely to get a site and then into a less assertive spatial position to keep the dog with me.

Spatial Positioning is something I talked a lot about, oh, 20 or 30 years ago and still do. Back then most pet dog trainers didn’t want to consider what it was or how it could be used. Now it seems to be something of an in thing. I will usually go over the use of spatial positioning on the first lesson with an in-home training program. It’s also an important part of lesson 2 and 3. Then in more advanced drills we use it quite a lot. Often we can get fairly good compliance from a dog by just using effective Spatial Positioning and other aspects is body language. Once the dog is doing a desirable behavior the handler has the option of choosing how to reward the behavior and create a new habit in the dog. We can think of a new habit as the new behavior pattern.

Using Spatial Positioning to create spatial pressure in its more nuanced form can be fairly complex. In its basic form it is fairly simple. Spatial pressure in its more basic form is simply moving into the dog’s space. This is usually done with an assertive body orientation. It’s my understanding that a lot of dog trainers use the term spatial pressure for all social interactions that involve body language, orientation, proximity, and metacommunication, while excluding most vocalizations.

It is interesting to note we also see the effects of both Spatial Positioning and spatial pressure in humans and other animals. There is a great deal of similarity within mammalian behavior, so humans and dogs often respond to stress, learning theory, and many social norms in a similar fashion.

Some components of spatial pressure:

• Orientation
• Proximity
• Movement
• Timing
• Context,
• Congruence
• Eye contact: Assertive gaze, praise gaze, social gaze, and instructive gaze. (Personally, I don’t consider this as part of spatial positioning, but spatial positioning is important for its effective use.)
• Experience (training)
• Temperament

It’s a Dance and Not Always About Dominance

When using spatial positioning I often want the dog to move out of my way the same way a partner moves when dancing. They move with you, both away and toward you. It involves avoidance, but not flight. It involves approach, but not necessarily aggression or assertiveness. Although there is usually some degree of ritualized aggression either from the handler, the dog, and often from both. You and the dog are a team moving in synchrony. This can range from a very loose coordination at a distance to fine grained movements, such as formal obedience drills. However, it is most often used in day to day interaction. These behaviors are often simple, but important for the safety of both the human and the dog. Behaviors such as not bolting out doors or moving away from people working in the kitchen.

For moving a dog we can often use the traditional or standard interaction distances Heini Hediger talked about. Here I’m thinking of how an animal will move in the desired direction according to a certain point of balance. I have used this driving or herding the dog in various circumstances. A couple that come to mind are getting a loose dog back into a house and controlling barking. I sometimes use movement, positioning, and distance to start getting control of barking dogs in a yard without using any training equipment. When combined with other behaviors that compete with barking, it can be quite useful.

Orientation

Orientation can be multifaceted and include a wide and very complex set of variables. However, here I am only going to focus on the relative position of the handler to the dog and the dog to the handler. This is usually how I will start teaching the principles of spatial positioning. It is easy to explain, yet not so easy to implement or master. In its simplest form it is simply facing and\or moving through any of eight directions. These are the eight points of an awareness box. They correspond to front, back, sides, and corners. The box moves with and corresponds to the handler’s and the dog’s physical orientation. In general I think of this as the angle of the head, shoulders, hands, hips, and feet.

The Human Has Eight Positions Of Orientation

Reviewing Some of the Main Points

Dogs react to spatial cues, such as spatial positioning, proximity, physical constraints, and spatial stress, with a variety of responses. Basically we can classify them as approach and avoidance. This can be thought of on one side as forms of approach, such as social attraction and play solicitation, a middle ground of appeasement behaviors, next as more defensive behaviors such as fight and flight responses. One may also see a combination of these behaviors all within a single behavioral episode. Using the proper body language by learning how spatial positioning can be incorporated into a training program is a standard way to begin understanding how to use spatial pressure.