Preference Assessment for Application of the Premack Principle

Abstract

The efficacy of employing verbal choice or reinforcement-menu choice as an indicator of free-operant play preferences was assessed in 22 second grade Ss by employing all three preference measures over 10 daily sessions. The correspondence of choice via menu or verbal preference indices with free-operant measures of response preference did not exceed chance. Intersubject agreement on free-operant rank orders of five classes of toy play for males and females was not evidenced; although intrasubject reliability in operant choice behavior for the first and last sessions was significant for all five toy classes. The implications of these findings for defining preferred or high probability events in classroom applications of the Premack principle is discussed.