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Teaching Eye-Contact with a Clicker
By Lisa Laney, Dip. DTBC, CPDT-KA, CBC

It is important to reiterate that your dog learns through behavior and consequence, not the spoken word. Dogs can however, learn to associate prompts like hand signals and verbal sues to tell them when to do a behavior, but they must understand which behavior we are looking for first. This outline will help you teach your dog the behavior of “sit” most effectively.

We will follow 4 basic steps to train most behaviors:

Step 1 – Lure training. Teaching the dog the target behavior. Start with your dog in a sit with food in hand. Bring the food to the dogs nose, then close your fist, and bring it up and away from your dog’s nose – like you’re holding a torch. Be patient, and wait for the dog to look away from your fist and at your eyes, click/treat (c/t) – repeat. After a few successful repetitions, move on to step 2.

Step 2 – Hand signal/cue. Working away from the food lure. Your dog is beginning to understand that the behavior of making eye contact with you – instead of looking at your closed fist - is making the click happen. Now you will begin to signal him with an empty hand – your hand should look just like it does with food in it, but there’s no food in it! Once your dog is reliably looking at you when you put your empty fist up, for clicks and treats (c/t), move on to step 3.

Step 3 – Introducing the verbal cue. Telling the dog when to perform the behavior through the spoken word. Say the verbal cue i.e., “Fido watch” or “Fido look” and follow it immediately with your hand signal - c/t correct responses.

Step 4 – The test. Once you have repeatedly paired the verbal cue with the hand signal, simply test the dogs understanding by not following the word with your hand signal. If you have properly paired the word with the hand signal, the dog should look at you when you say the cue (i.e., “Fido look”) alone.

Step 5 – Adding duration. Simply withhold the click for a few seconds when the dog looks at you. This builds more committed eye contact and focus. 

Step 6 – Add other cues for behavior when the dog looks at you. For example, give you cue, i.e., “Fido watch” then when the dog looks at you, ask him for another behavior such as a sit. So for example, “Fido watch” - Fido looks at you – give the cue to sit – THEN click/treat and release. This teaches the dog that the cue to watch will precede another request for behavior for which he will likely be reinforced.

Step 7 - Placing the behavior on a reinforcement schedule – maintaining the learned behavior and keeping the response strong and reliable. Once a behavior is learned and the dog understands the cue for it and responds correctly and reliably, it is time to start reducing the amount of c/t’s we give. This is what keeps the response strong and lasting. Simply begin to “forget” to c/t about 25% of the time, weaning down from there. Make sure that you are mixing it up so that there is no pattern, and that this is done gradually. Also, select the best responses to c/t and withhold the c/t for the sluggish ones. That way, you are teaching the dog that the quickest responses have the greatest chance of earning reinforcement!

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