Response and stimulus prompts both prompting behavior to occur, but what they act upon is what makes them different. Response prompt– they actually act upon the response itself, not the antecedent stimulus. Giving somebody a verbal instruction, leading them to a particular location, physical prompting, modeling a particular response. This all is acting upon the response. Versus a stimulus prompt which acts on the antecedent stimulus. It is essentially an added Sᴰ that makes the Sᴰ more salient. It’s almost like something that you add to the Sᴰ to make the Sᴰ go, “Hey, look at me, I’m the Sᴰ.” This can take lots of forms. There could be movement, where you could point to it, touch it, look at it, draw attention to it, “Hey, it’s this one over here.” Position– moving it closer to make it more salient as the thing to evoke the response. And then, of course, redundancy cues, where you pair the correct response with some dimension of the stimulus– that is what you’re trying to get the person to respond with. Writing the word “red” in red is a redundancy cue. It’s both red, and it says “red,” and you’re trying to evoke the response, “red.”
The key is that stimulus prompts are on the Sᴰ. Response prompts act on the actual behavior, which is confusing because they both actually help to evoke the behavior, or have the correct response be emitted when the Sᴰ isn’t enough. And don’t forget, they can be faded; in fact, they should be faded. One of the things we have to remember is that they are temporary, and if you can remove the prompt and the person still knows what to do, that’s how you know that it is, in fact, a prompt and not an Sᴰ.