This is what Pandora does. After you sign up for a Pandora account they walk you through creating a customized radio station. First you choose a song or artist that you like to be the seed of your station. Once you do this Pandora will play songs from that artist and from other similar artists. You then have the opportunity to give feedback with either thumbs up, thumbs down, or skipping the song. Sometimes the fit is right, you like the song and you give the song a thumbs up and other times the song isn’t quite what you wanted and you give it a thumbs down. Based on your response Pandora selects another song that it thinks you might like to hear. As Pandora does this it collects information on the songs that you like and the songs that you don’t like to build a profile. It uses the information from all of its listeners so that if you like music from a certain artist and other people who like the same artist also like music from a different artist Pandora will play music from the second artist.
With the students we work with if we know that they like Playdoh we might see if they like silly putty. If the student likes crayons maybe they like painting or markers or colored pencils. After you do you initial preference assessment continue to throw in new items like Pandora does. No you won’t get it right each time but the more items you try and the more feedback you get on each item the better you will get at finding possible reinforcers.