The Premack principle, what exactly is it?

Premack’s principle is a theory of operant conditioning (Skinner), proposed by the American psychologist David Premack.

Given two responses in an operant conditioning procedure, The more likely response will reinforce the less likely behavior, while the less likely response will not reinforce the more likely behavior.. Put like that, it’s a little difficult to understand; However, we hope that after reading the article you can come back here and find meaning in these words.

The Premack Principle recognizes the fact that people have differential preferences. Premack suggests that different aspects of jobs can be organized hierarchically, the most preferred at the top, the least preferred at the bottom. Given the choice, people will tend to spend more time performing those tasks higher up in their job hierarchy.

Unfortunately, this can mean that other tasks, equally necessary in the hierarchy, receive less attention than they should. Premack noted that The reinforcer can be any situation or activity that the subject values.. Therefore, a pleasant and frequent behavior increases the performance of another less preferable or probable behavior, as long as the first is made contingent on the second.

Premack’s principle provides guidance for choosing effective reinforcers.: observe what people do when they have to make a decision and order those behaviors in terms of probability. On the other hand, any reinforcer that is applied too frequently can cause satiety and reduce responses.

Delving into the Premack principle

Premack pointed out that the responses involved with Commonly used reinforcers involve activities that animals are very likely to perform. In an experiment with food reinforcement, participants are generally deprived of food and are therefore very likely to engage in eating behavior.

In contrast, instrumental responses tend to be low probability activities. For example, the probability that an experimentally naïve rat will press a lever is much smaller than the probability that it will eat. Premack (1965) proposed that this difference in the probabilities of responses is crucial for reinforcement.

Premack’s principle focuses on the difference in the probability of the instrumental response and the reinforcing response. Therefore, It is also known as the principle of differential probability. Eating will reinforce lever pressing, but eating is usually more likely to be “prying.” Other than that, Premack’s theory denies that there is anything special about a reinforcer.

Experiments that were carried out to test the theory

Premack and his collaborators They carried out many experiments to test their theory (Premack, 1965). One of the first studies It has been made with small children. They were given two alternative responses (eating candy and playing with a pinball machine), and then measuring which response was more likely for each child. Some of the children preferred eating candy to playing pinball, but others preferred to play with the machine.

In the second phase of the experiment, the children were tested with one of the two procedures. In one, eating was designated as the reinforcing response and playing pinball as the instrumental response. That is, the children had to play with the pinball machine to have access to the candy. Consistent with Premack’s theory, Under these circumstances, only children who preferred eating to playing pinball showed a reinforcement effect.

In another test, the roles of both responses were reversed. Eating was the instrumental response and playing pinball was the reinforcing response. The kids had to eat candy to get access to the pinball machine. In this situation, only children who preferred playing over eating showed a reinforcement effect.

Applications of Premack’s principle

The Premack Principle has had a major impact on the design of reinforcement principles used to help diverse clinical populations.

Charlop, Kurtz, and Casey (1990) compared the effectiveness of various forms of reinforcement in training some academic skills in different children with autism (Hanley, Iwata, Thompson, & Lindberg, 2000).

Tasks included identifying, among various objects, which were the same or different from one held by the teacher, adding coins, and giving correct responses to sentences designed to teach receptive pronouns or prepositions.

In an experimental condition, a preferred food (for example, a piece of chocolate, cereal, or a cookie) was used as a reinforcer without food deprivation having been programmed.. In another condition, the reinforcer consisted of the opportunity to make a stereotyped response for three to five seconds.

In each case, the opportunity to engage in stereotyped responding generated better performance on task training than did food reinforcement. Delayed echolalia and perseverative behavior allowed an increase in task performance above that of the observer with the food reinforcer.

These results indicate that High probability responses can reinforce lower probability responses, even if reinforcing responses are not characteristic of normal behavior.

Conclusions: the power of reinforcers

With the Premack principle, any behavior could function as a reinforcer, as long as it was more probable than the instrumental response. Differential probability as the key to reinforcement set the stage for the application of reinforcement procedures in different contexts and problems.

Premack’s principle advanced our thinking about reinforcement in important ways. He encouraged thinking of reinforcers as responses rather than stimuli. However, problems with the measurement of response probability and more rigorous examination of instrumental conditioning procedures distanced Premack’s principle from later theoretical developments.

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