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Temple Grandin presents "How Being a Visual Thinker Helped Me Understand Animals" at the 2017 Annual Convention in Denver, CO.
All my thoughts are in pictures. When somebody says a word, I see a picture in my imagination. If I think about the word goose, I start visualizing pictures of geese, such as Canada geese on the campus quad, Mother Goose of the nursery rhyme, and flocks of geese in corn fields. When I was in my twenties, I thought everybody thought the same way I did. In my first work with cattle, I observed that they would often refuse to move across a shadow on the ground or a coat on a fence. It was obvious to me to look at what the animal was seeing because of the way my thought processes worked. Research studies now provide evidence that animals have specific sensory-based memories. One study showed that habituating a horse to the sudden opening of an umbrella does not transfer to flapping tarp. In my own work, I discovered that if I removed the coat from the fence, the cattle would move easily through the chute. In my work with flighty antelopes, our team was able to condition Nyala and Bongo antelopes to voluntarily enter a box for a feed reward and then receive injections and be blood sampled. A new sudden novel stimulus will send these animals crashing into wall. To prevent this, we had to spend ten days habituating them to the sliding door on the box BEFORE we could start standard operant conditioning. The first day the door was opened only one inch and when the animal oriented towards me, I stopped moving it. The next day it was moved 2 inches. To prevent an antelope from having a massive behavioral response we stopped moving the door when it turned and oriented its head towards it. Never push the antelope past the orienting response when a new thing is introduced.