 So, let's jump into shaping. This is kind of a fun one. This is one that we're all going to be very familiar with. So, shaping. The idea is with shaping, we're going to create a new response. Typically, we talk about shaping in the context of creating new behavior, or complex behavior, behavior that hasn't happened before. And this is one of those procedures that you can use to get new behavior, because that's always a challenge that we have in behavior analysis, is looking at answering the question of how do you create a new behavior? If you can only reinforce behavior that's already happened, how do you create new ones? Well, shaping is one of those. Another one is going to be chaining, and we'll look at that in a second. So, the definition of shaping is simple. It's the reinforcing of successive approximations of desired behavior. So, successive approximations simply means as you get closer, you're going to get a reinforcer. So, we're going to start out at level one, whatever level one is, and you're going to get a reinforcer for level one, and then next time, you're not going to give you a reinforcer for level one. You're going to have to get to level two. You're going to get closer to that response. An example, I mean, a quick example here is with a dog teaching them to sit on their hind legs and kind of beg or something like that. We call it sit pretty. So, with Pex always say sit pretty. So, what the idea is she sits on her bum, and then she puts her front paws in the air, and she kind of just dangles them out in front of her. It looks really cute, right? So, we say sit pretty. So, the first step was to sit. So, once you sit, then once she's at, she's good. Next thing she had to do was kind of rear up. So, she had to rear up on her hind legs, but not stand up. Just kind of just lean back to where she's vertical, and she's still on her bum and her rear legs, but her front legs are in the air. So, in order to earn the reinforcers, she had to not only sit now, but she had to rear a little bit. The next step was to get her paws kind of hanging in the right fashion. So, now she never gets reinforced just for, if you say sit pretty, for just sitting. She has to go through all those things. So, we created a new behavior. So, we start out with an individual behavior, with one behavior. We can shape it to look completely different in order to achieve the goal behavior. The next step that we actually did with the sit pretty thing was we had her stand. So, now we would train the one behavior of sit, then we shaped that into sit pretty. And then the next step is to, when we say stand, she has to then stand up from that sit pretty position. So, now when we say stand up, she just kind of rears back and then stands on her hind legs and dangles her front ones out in front of her and it's like sitting pretty, but she's actually standing. So, we took one behavior of sitting and completely changed that into standing with your paws kind of dangling to look cute. It's a completely different looking behavior. But that was the goal behavior. That's what we wanted. The game that all of us played as a kid was a shaping game. You know, the hot and cold game. That's shaping, right? So, you know, there's other names for it. But when I was growing up, it was hot cold. So, as you got closer to the particular thing, they would say, oh, you're getting hot, you're getting warmer, you're getting warmer. And you never say you're getting warmer when you're not, right? Because then that will get you walking in the wrong direction. But when you get that, when you do achieve it, or when you do get, really get closer, then you get your reinforcer. That's that successive approximation. Basically, this combines with extension to produce new behavior. Old behaviors aren't going to work anymore, new behaviors are. So you've got to try, you know, to try your old behavior, but it's not good enough anymore. Now you've got to get something else in there. It's something a little extra. And then you, so you reinforce something extra. Getting a little closer to that goal behavior. And then you extinguish all the other ones. At least in that context. So, for example, with Pixel, we say, sit pretty. Sit pretty is a discriminative stimulus to mean sit pretty. It doesn't mean just sit. It doesn't mean stand. It doesn't mean lying down. It doesn't mean roll over. It doesn't mean shake. All behaviors will happen on occasion. She'll try all sorts of shit when we say she's sit pretty. But then we extinguish those. We keep those on extinction. We do not reinforce those other behaviors. Only once she sits pretty, then she gets a reinforcer. We'll treat her something. Baby talk is a great example of this one. Think about babies. And think about adults and how they interact with babies. The very first step with a baby is just going, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everybody's going to get excited. The first time they've realized something, everybody's going to get excited. They'll say, ooh, look at the baby, they're sitting there talking. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the next time, they're just going to have to do something a little bit more important, right? They're going to have to maybe say, mom. Or mama, or data, or something. Or they have to get close to it, right? They don't have to actually just be perfectly enunciating the word dad or whatever. And you're like, oh my god, you said daddy. You know, you get all excited about it. But now, that just grunting does not can earn that kiddo anything anymore, right? And in the future, you're going to have to get closer to saying actually dad or daddy or whatever it is that you're trying to get him to say. And you slowly extinguish the old ones, the ones that didn't, or the ones that worked originally but don't work now, we extinguish those and we make a new requirement built into it. And I mean, theoretically, this, it's not completely agreed upon yet, but this is one of those major processes that are involved in learning the language. This is part of what happens.