Comment to your peer:

For stimulus generalization, consider teaching a child with autism to greet people in different settings. Initially, the child learns to say “hello” to their teacher. To ensure stimulus generalization occurs, greeting behavior is gradually installed in different settings. We train students how to greet other teachers in the school, family members at home, cashiers at a grocery store, or neighbors in the community. This way, they extend the contexts, or stimuli, to which the child responds with a greeting, thus broadening them out to include different people and settings.

For response generalization, an example is teaching a teenager with intellectual disability how to ask for help differently. First, they are trained to request help using words vocally, such as “Can you help me please?” To encourage response generalization, we teach several appropriate methods of requesting assistance. Some of them are hand-raising, picture exchange communication systems to request help, texting a specific contact person for assistance, or physically gesturing, such as pointing towards the chore they want assistance with and showcasing they need help. This is a nice development of the idea that the individual can employ several related expressions to perform the same task (seek assistance) in various contexts.

These types of generalizations differ in several key aspects. Stimulus generalization aims to increase the antecedent stimuli that trigger a particular response. In contrast, response generalization seeks to increase the number of reactions that can be used to achieve a specific function. In stimulus generalization, it is the attempt to make a learned behavior recur in other stimulus settings. In contrast, in response to generalization, it attempts to make the learned behavior occur in various ways to meet the same need.