Hey guys. Welcome back to drinking from the toilet, a podcast about training with positive reinforcement in real life.

I'm your host, Hannah Brandigan.

This week, we're going to talk about prompting. Listener Liz Randall with Dogs Abound in California wrote in with a topic that she had questions about. So shout out to Liz. Thanks for reaching out.

I really appreciate it. Her question was about the difference between

luring, prompting, and physical cues, and what recommendations she should make to her students.

Is there a difference? Where do you draw the line? Is one of these things bad? Is one of these things good?

And I agree. I think that's a really good question. At first, on the surface, it may seem like it's kind of an obvious answer, but really, when you think about it, it can get kind of complicated. And if you spend any time with me, you know that that is my favorite kind of question. I love it when it gets complicated. Okay. So in some ways, there's really no difference at all. All of these things really fall under that antecedent umbrella. They're all part of the conditions under which a behavior occurs, and so they influence the likelihood of that behavior occurring. And to make matters worse, these words often get used almost interchangeably in our everyday language, even among dog trainers.

So let's see if we can unpack this a little bit.

I think it may help to think of this as a little bit of a hierarchy.

It may help to think that all prompts function as cues, but not all cues are prompts. And we can even take that a little bit further,

take it one step further, and look at this like as a, again, as a spectrum, a gradient, a hierarchy,

in that luring is a subset of prompting, and prompting is a subset of cues. So all of these things

are going to function as part of the queue. And then each one is kind of a subset of cues. So all of these things are going to function as part of the

queue. And then each one is kind of a specialized category of the other. So anaccedents being the

largest category, the big umbrella, and then under that we have cues and then prompts and then

luring is a particular kind of prompt that we want to be aware of.

So when we're talking in terms of operant conditioning, particularly in practical application,

we do make the distinction between a discriminative stimulus or a cue and a prompt.

And I think that's important because it changes how we approach the training.

The differences are very much in that application, in how we use them. But that does change the outcome that we

get. So it's important to be aware of it and again to be able to discuss it clearly and intelligently

and to sound like we know what we're talking about. It's even better to know what you're talking

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