Eddies Desicion process

Eddie is still up on the hill after Niko and I tried to get him to come inside. His behavior suggests that in making decisions he sums all the positive and negative factors assigned to elements of his environment. If the net total is positive he moves closer and if negative he moves further away. It also appears that the scary part of the house is going in and out. Once inside he is relaxed and seems glad. So the inside of the house is a net positive and changing from outside to inside is a negative. In physics terms he must overcome the potential hill or obstacle between going from one desirable location to another. He had the same problem going in and out during his time at the pound also. The difficult part of this model is figuring out what elements of his environment he is seeing and how much negative or positive waiting he gives. As an aside he is just as happy weather or not I'm present in the house.

The question now is how to increase the positive weighting toward going inside. Negatives right now are: rain, wind, trees blowing, overcast conditions. One might think that a negative like rain might drive inside, but I don't think calculates the negation of a negative as a positive like human mathematicians do. Essentially his learning process and the fact that his behavior is changing means that the weighting or relative importance he gives each environmental element is changing. Its also possible and likely that things like weather or rain actually have a multiplying effect on more than one element, possible affecting his brain chemistry on a global level like moods in people.

So with that in mind Niko and I are going to slog around with Eddie on the hill, and see if that affects his willingness to come inside. Nothing like a good slog in the snowing raining cold to raise good spirits.