PCT part 1. Your Dog’s Not Misbehaving—They’re Regulating Reality
- Oliver Ringrose
- Jun 6
- 15 min read
Introduction: When Behaviour Isn’t What It Seems
You're in the kitchen, mug in hand, trying to remember why you walked in there. Meanwhile, your dog appears like some silent, furry Jedi, sits in front of you, and stares. Not in a creepy way. In a “hello, human, I require your assistance” kind of way.
When you finally make eye contact, he softens. The tail flicks. A small whine escapes him. You check his water. Bone dry. Classic.
He didn’t bark, didn’t scratch at the cupboard, didn’t drag the bowl around like a maraca. He just… sat. And waited. Somehow, he knew you’d get it.
This isn’t training. This isn’t a command chain. This is a dog navigating his world—and you—like a seasoned diplomat.
Welcome to Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), a way of understanding behaviour that might just change how you see dogs, people, and yourself. Also, possibly how you explain your own kitchen behaviour.
This is the first blog in what will be a set of blogs that suggests a new way of looking at behaviour, in my opinion a better way that the traditional operant models that every dog trainer learns at dog trainer school!
Chapter One: Where We Started—The Behaviourist Toolbox
Let’s take a moment to pay homage to our behaviourist ancestors. Pavlov, Skinner, the usual suspects.
Pavlov showed that dogs could associate one event with another—specifically, a ticking metronome (not a bell, despite what every GCSE textbook insists) followed by food. The dogs salivated. The humans took notes. Science applauded. He called this a conditional reflex—because it depended on conditions. Logical, really.
Enter B.F. Skinner. He taught us that consequences shape behaviour. Reinforcement = more of it. Punishment = less. Treats! Clickers! Boxes with buttons! Behaviourism exploded into training halls everywhere.
But—and here’s the rub—both models focused on behaviour as something we do because something else happened. There’s very little room for messy things like agency, intention, or “doing something because the world feels weird and I need it to not.”
Important disclaimer: this is not your cue to fling your operant and classical conditioning books into the compost bin. They still matter. They’re the chisels and screwdrivers in our toolkit. But PCT? That’s the bloody workbench. It’s the thing we build the whole puzzle on.
Chapter Two: Perceptual Control Theory—Flipping the Lens
Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), courtesy of William T. Powers, says something radically simple:
Behaviour is not a response. It’s an attempt to control perception.
Dogs (and humans) don’t just act because stuff happens. They act because the world isn’t how it’s supposed to be, and they’re doing their best to put it right.
Think about it. The dog isn’t barking because the doorbell rang. He’s barking because the ringing messed with his perception of security, and he’s trying to re-establish it—with noise. Glorious, spit-filled noise.
And when he ignores your recall? It’s not because he’s cheeky. It’s because what he’s smelling or chasing or exploring gives him a stronger grip on his internal goal at that moment. That pheasant scent trumps your sausage every time.
This changes everything. Suddenly, behaviour isn’t about control. It’s about understanding what your dog is trying to control.
“A key distinction between Perceptual Control Theory (outputs control inputs) and stimulus-response (inputs generate outputs) models is that with Perceptual Control Theory the goal is internal to the organism.”
Dogs aren’t just reacting. They’re running internal software that monitors and manages the world in real time.
Here is a short video from Dr. Eva de Hullu explaining the core concept of PCT, this topic is heavy but at least try to get to the elastic band experiment as that may help the penny drop for you!
Defining the Reference Setpoint: The Dog’s Perception of “Normal”
At the heart of Perceptual Control Theory is the idea of a reference setpoint—the internal sense of how the world should be. It’s what the dog is constantly comparing reality to.
This isn’t a conscious thought, like “I should feel safe right now.” It’s a felt expectation—bodily, emotional, sometimes even inherited—that tells the dog what “normal” feels like. Secure. Predictable. Comfortable. Whole.
When the outside world doesn’t match this internal template, the dog acts. That action—barking, moving, avoiding, seeking—isn’t random. It’s a precise (if sometimes messy) attempt to reduce the gap between what is and what should be.
Understanding what a dog’s reference might be in a moment is the holy grail of applied PCT. It moves us from reacting to behaviour to interpreting its deeper purpose—and partnering with the dog to help restore balance.
The Hidden Mechanics: Reorganisation and Perceptual Tuning
So what happens when that gap—the error between what the dog perceives and what they want to perceive—can’t be closed with their usual strategies?
Enter: reorganisation.
Reorganisation is the nervous system’s built-in backup plan. When a control system (like “keep this door closed,” or “stay near my person”) fails again and again, the dog’s brain doesn’t just give up. It starts trying new configurations. Random ones, even.
It alters which control loops are prioritised, it tests different behaviours, it shifts attention. It’s trial-and-error from the inside out.
You see this in young dogs trying to get your attention: they jump, bark, spin—and then one day, they sit. And you notice. And something clicks. That wasn’t trained; it was reorganised. The system stumbled into a solution that brought perception back into alignment with the reference.
But here’s the thing: reorganisation is effortful.
It takes energy. And if too many systems are stuck, the dog may enter a more chaotic phase—more error, more dysregulation—before stability returns. That’s where we often see behavioural “spikes”: sudden barking, shutdowns, refusals, or novel problem behaviours.
Understanding reorganisation helps us meet those moments with compassion instead of control. The dog isn’t breaking down—they’re breaking through.
Our role? To hold space for that process. To offer structure without pressure. To notice the small wins. Because sometimes, all a dog needs is one tiny success to stabilise the loop again.
Chapter Three: The Dog Who Looked at Me
Let’s return to Teak—the Jedi Vizsla.
He sits. He stares. He waits.
I make eye contact. He visibly relaxes.
A tiny whine. The kind of micro-emotion shift that tells you, without doubt:
“Ah, you’ve seen me. You’re back in the game.”
Turns out, his water bowl is empty. Again. He didn’t bark. Didn’t whinge. Didn’t throw himself melodramatically to the ground like a teenage poet. Just calmly, quietly, controlled his perception of “my human sees me and helps when something is wrong.”
It’s not about the water, not really. It’s about the relationship. The social fabric. The “we’ve got each other” feeling that makes life feel safe. That’s PCT in action.
Chapter Four: Anxiety—The Weight of Unresolved Errors
Here’s where we delve into the good stuff. Not good because anxiety is fun (it’s not), but because this is where PCT shines.
Anxiety isn’t always born through fear. Often, it’s what happens when a dog (or person) can’t get their internal world to line up with the outer one—and they’re out of ideas, it can come from a lack of agency and choice and from being micro managed or even not being managed at all.
A bit of unpredictability? Fine. But if your dog:
Can’t predict when they’ll be walked
Gets mixed signals about rules
Can’t escape noise or pressure
Loses access to comfort or clarity
...you might have a slow-drip error loop that spirals into anxiety. The result?
Barking at shadows
Pacing like they’re on a budget airline flight
Overreaction to tiny triggers
Or giving up entirely—what we call “shut down,” but what might be better described as “emotional buffering.”
They’re not mad. They’re overwhelmed by mismatch. That’s all. Too many systems failing to stabilise, and not enough outlets to bring things back into control.
Chapter Five: Barking at the Door—A Case Study in Perception Control
Cue the doorbell. The dog explodes. You panic. Someone shouts. The postie flees. Aunt Margaret wonders aloud if “he’s always like this.”
To many, this is rudeness. Or guarding. Or reactivity. Or “a dominance issue” (drink every time someone says that, responsibly!!).
But really, it’s just your dog saying: “Excuse me! The perimeter has been breached! Who authorised this?!”
The barking isn’t disobedience. It’s a desperate effort to control the perception of safety, predictability, and territory. When we suppress it without understanding it, we just pile more error on top of a very tired little brain.
In my house? I acknowledge it. I say thanks. We check the door together. My dogs learn: “I bark. My human investigates. We’re a team.”
Soon enough, the volume drops—not because I squashed it, but because they stopped needing to shout.
Chapter Six: You Are Part of the System
You’re not outside the problem. You’re part of the loop. A living, breathing variable in your dog’s perceptual control system.
If you’re consistent, predictable, and responsive, your dog will trust you as part of the control mechanism. If you’re unpredictable, explosive, inconsistent, or checked out—well, you become part of the error.
Now, don’t panic. We all mess it up. Sometimes I’m the stabiliser. Sometimes I’m the chaos goblin. But knowing your role matters. Because dogs are stuck in a system they didn’t choose—and often can’t leave.
We, on the other hand? We can:
Leave the room
Change the rules
Quit the job
Ghost the dodgy WhatsApp group
They can’t. They’re legally required to stay leashed, crated, quiet, polite, house-trained, and friendly on demand. All while living in a society designed for humans.
They don’t get to vote. They don’t get to opt out. So we owe it to them to realise: they’re not stubborn. They’re just doing their absolute best with the tiny amount of control we allow them.
Sometimes that control is taken for safety.
Sometimes for law. Sometimes for the fragile egos of our neighbours. But whatever the reason, it leaves dogs in a place where their internal experience can only be made right if we help them do it.
And here's another layer: some dogs, because of breed or personality, need us to help maintain more control—not less.
Guardian breeds, herders, even some working lines—these dogs are hardwired to perceive and respond to particular environmental cues. If left without structure, they don’t relax into freedom. They escalate into management mode. Herding things that don’t need herding. Guarding things that aren’t under threat. Trying to control a world they aren’t equipped to manage alone.
Think of the Border Collie herding toddlers, or the Maremma fixating on the garden fence.
These dogs aren’t being difficult—they’re being exactly what they were designed to be.
In PCT terms, their reference values are tuned tightly to certain perceptions—movement, space, novelty, proximity. If we don’t help provide external boundaries or shared control strategies, they default to genetic scripts. Not because they’re “dominant”—because they’re doing what they were built to do.
Our job isn’t to suppress that. It’s to co-pilot it. Structure isn’t the enemy of agency. Done well, it’s the thing that supports it. And in supporting their perception of safety and purpose, we become part of the system that makes them feel whole.
Because just like us, dogs function best when they’re not flying the plane alone.
Chapter Seven: The Path Forward (With Gundog Applications)
Let’s ground this in real-world training—specifically gundog work. Because while PCT sounds like a theory from a neuroscience journal (and it is), it’s also exactly what I see playing out in the field every day.
This photo is a perfect example, Nala here would really like the dummy launcher to fire a dummy for her to retrieve, she was not instructed to offer this behaviour, we were supposed to be taking a break, but instead she is trying it out to see if it works, she has a history of targeting a place board, a history of performing the retrieve and a fairy new history of the dummy launchers and this is what's happened when you put all those into the same melting pot! She has a bit of a reputations for trying behaviours to see what's works and it is where her real learning takes place.
When the Ball Just Doesn’t Cut It
During a training session, I worked with a retriever who gave me a clear insight into what I call the Primary Contextual Motivator (PCM thanks Kim Brophey)—the dominant perceptual goal in a specific situation. In this case, a retrieve had been placed in the environment, and his system locked on.
The handler tried to reinforce a solid sit-stay with a ball. The dog picked it up, then spat it out. Not disinterested. Not confused. Just very clear: "That’s not what I’m working on right now."
From a classic behaviourist standpoint, this doesn’t make sense.
According to the Premack Principle, a more probable behaviour (chasing a ball) should reinforce a less probable one (holding position). But Premack assumes probabilities are context-free. PCT shows us otherwise.
This wasn’t about probability—it was about relevance. The dog wasn’t looking to chase. He was focused on completing the retrieve. The ball was irrelevant to that internal reference.
So we shifted.
A second dummy was planted behind him, out of sight. Once the sit-stay held and the handler returned, we cued him to hunt back.
He lit up. Retrieved. Delivered. The loop closed. The behaviour stabilised.
When we used a reinforcer aligned with the active perceptual goal, everything clicked. And more importantly, the handler’s role shifted in the dog’s eyes—from gatekeeper to guide.
The Place board as a Start Button
With the same dog, we took it further. Instead of cueing the retrieve session, we stood silently beside his place board and waited.
He didn’t rush. He sniffed. Shook off. Urinated. He was using environmental behaviours to regulate himself.
Eventually, he stepped onto the place board. And we began.
This wasn’t obedience. This was autonomous engagement. He opted into the training loop once his internal system aligned with the external demand and through it he was successful.
We repeated this after each retrieve:
A backward hunt as reward
A treat scatter
And another silent pause while he reset
Each time, he chose when to restart.
This dog had a history of demand barking, grip frustration, and over-arousal. Those behaviours melted away—not because we suppressed them, but because we gave him space to recover emotional control before continuing.
He didn’t just learn steadiness. He learned how to return himself to it.
And in doing so, he reframed his handler once again—not as someone who restrains, but someone who understands what it feels like to need space before doing the thing.
Rethinking Reinforcement Premack tells us high-probability behaviours reinforce low ones. But that’s only true if the behaviour aligns with the internal reference.
In PCT terms: it’s not about probability—it’s about relevance. The “reward” has to serve the dog’s regulation goal. That’s when behaviour clicks.
Chapter Eight: Prediction is the Thread—Memory, Meaning, and the Moment
Okay. This is the part where Oliver gets his philosophical spanner out and starts lobbing it into the well-oiled machinery of behavioural theory (as he does).
Don’t worry—we’re not breaking anything. Just loosening a few bolts to make space for something softer, deeper, and a little more alive.
Until now, we’ve been working with strong structural tools—Perceptual Control Theory, emotional systems, control loops. They’ve given us incredible clarity about how behaviour functions. But here’s where we pause, look sideways, and ask: what if perception isn’t just data? What if it’s steeped in memory? In expectation? In meaning?
This chapter doesn’t undo everything that came before. But it does complicate it—in the best way.
We're going deep. Into the felt sense of prediction. Into trauma, anticipation, and what it means for a dog to live in a world that's not just made of events, but of emotionally charged possibilities.
Ready?
Good. Let’s go.
If Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) tells us that behaviour is the control of perception, then prediction is the thread that weaves through every loop. It’s not just a forward guess—it’s the past, the present, and the future braided into one living strand.
Dogs don’t simply react to what is; they move through the world shaped by what was and what they expect will be. Prediction is how your dog hears your keys and knows what’s next. It’s how they recognize that your shoes mean a walk, your coat means you’re leaving, and your silence sometimes means something is wrong.
And sometimes, it’s how they relive trauma before it happens. That “phantom” anxiety—the pacing before a storm, the flinch at a tone of voice—isn’t always about the now. It’s about what the nervous system has learned to expect. The future, leaking backward into the present.
The Dog Brain as a Bayesian Engine (the what now?)
Henry H. Yin’s paper Aligning Brain and Behaviour calls out a central flaw in many traditional neuroscience models: treating behaviour as a reaction to stimuli rather than an act of control. PCT offers a compelling reframe—behaviour as an active process of minimizing the gap between current perception and internal goals. It explains behaviour not as a chain of causes, but as a system trying to bring the world into alignment with what matters most.
But real brains—especially emotional, relational brains like dogs’—also behave like Bayesian engines: constantly adjusting predictions based on experience. If your dog hears the treat jar and expects food, but you start using that jar for paperclips, they’ll adapt. They won’t just react—they’ll update.
Their brain runs a rolling average of meaning, always adjusting what cues are worth responding to.
Prediction, in this context, isn’t about making fixed forecasts. It’s about expectation weighted by memory—a lived, felt calibration of risk, reward, and safety.
Prediction, Perception, and Control
In strict PCT terms, prediction doesn’t sit inside the model. PCT is a negative feedback framework, where behaviour works to reduce the discrepancy between a desired state and a perceived state. It doesn’t require prediction to function—and in fact, it critiques feedforward models where predictions are treated as causal drivers of behaviour.
But in living systems, prediction still plays a vital role—not as the engine, but as the lens.
Prediction doesn’t drive behaviour in PCT—it shapes perception, and biases what gets noticed, prioritized, or acted upon. The feedback loop is still trying to minimize error—but the perceived error is already coloured by past experience and anticipated outcomes.
That’s why a dog might start barking before the doorbell rings. Why they may avoid a space where nothing is visibly wrong—because their system has learned that something might be. The reference state isn’t just about what’s happening now. It’s about what the system is prepared to defend against.
Trauma, in this frame, isn’t about what happened—it’s about what’s expected to happen again.
PCT helps us see these not as irrational behaviours, but as rational, perceptual acts of self-protection. The dog is not reacting to stimuli—they are controlling their world to feel safer, using everything their nervous system has learned.
What This Means for Us
It means we must stop thinking of dogs as beings stuck in the moment. They are, like us, woven through time. They don’t live by the clock—but they do live by pattern, by memory, by anticipation.
If we want to help dogs regulate, we must work with more than their current behaviour. We need to gently rewrite their expectations—showing them that new outcomes are possible. That not every doorbell means chaos. That not every silence is a warning. That the world can shift, and so can its meanings.
Prediction is not a dry calculation—it’s a felt sense of what is likely to come. It’s memory overlaid on sensation. It’s history etched into posture and breath. It’s your dog standing at the door long before you’ve said a word—because they know. Or think they do.
And if we want to help them feel safe, we must work not only with behaviour, but with what their nervous system expects.
Because that’s where safety lives. That’s where regulation begins. And that’s where healing becomes possible.
With time, trust, and care, prediction doesn’t have to be haunted by the past. It can be re-braided into a thread that’s strong, steady, and golden.
For a deeper dive into how perceptions themselves are formed—and the rich tapestry of sensory, emotional, and social lenses dogs use to shape their worlds—check out my next blog: ‘Mapping the Dog’s World: Layers of Perception.’
Final Thoughts: A New Lens on Old Behaviours Here’s what a PCT-informed future might look like:
We stop trying to fix behaviour and start trying to understand it.
We honour perception instead of punishing its expression.
We support dogs in regaining control—not by dominating, but by partnering.
That might mean:
More choice less control or...
Less choice more control! (it depends, I had to get that in here somewhere!)
More predictability
Fewer power struggles
More conversations, fewer commands
A dog who feels in control of their life is not just easier to live with. They’re more relaxed, more cooperative, more themselves.
And let’s be honest—aren’t we all a bit better when we feel like the world makes sense?
Next time your dog does something that drives you up the wall—stares at the fridge, paces at night, spins when the post arrives—don’t go for the correction just yet.
Pause. Ask:
What perception are they trying to get back in control of?
How can I help?
Should I give time and space?
Should I step in?
You might find the behaviour melts away. Or you might find something better: understanding, trust, a shift in the relationship.
And maybe—just maybe—you’ll start spotting your own PCT loops, too.
(Hint: that random urge to check your phone? Yeah. That’s one.)
Further Reading
Powers, W.T. (1973). Behaviour: The Control of Perception
Schneider, S. (2012). The Science of Consequences
Marken, R.S. (2009). You Say You Had a Revolution: Methodological Foundations of PCT
Krakauer, J.W. et al. (2019). The Life of Behavior. Neuron, 104(1), 25–36
Slime Mold Time Mold (2025). The Mind in the Wheel series
Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Acknowledgements This blog grew from conversations—with dogs, with people, with coffee-fuelled parts of myself.
It’s an organism, grown from the seed of experience in tension with the weight of received wisdom. Never be afraid to question what you’ve been told is “the truth.” We don’t know everything. In fact, we know very little.
But most importantly, this grew from generous thought partnerships—with people who keep asking deeper questions and making room for better answers.
With heartfelt thanks to Brian Fleming and Cat Harbord and their outstanding brains, and also the likes of Kim Brophey and Andrew Hale—for challenging what we think we know, for nurturing nuance, and for holding space for ideas that might otherwise go unheard. Your curiosity and care ripple far beyond words.
It’s serious. But not solemn. I hope it leaves you thinking, laughing, and above all: listening.
If you are finding this interesting then the second blog can be found here: PCT part 2. The Dog’s Inner Lens: Mapping How Perception Shapes Behaviour
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