ABSTRACT
WhenPremack raised doubts concerning the extinction process as a technique for abolishing smoking behavior, Tomkins mentioned the apparently successful use of satiation is some recently reported work. Premack replied that he had done quite a bit of work using habituation but had usually found considerable recovery. He has not been able to find in the laboratory a behavior analogous to smoking that can be eliminated permanently through a satiation procedure. It is conceivable that using satiation might result in a low probability for a behavior, and this probability in turn might make it possible to operate effectively upon the behavior through counterconditioning and other procedures, thus exploiting its low probability; but he doubted the efficacy of satiation by itself. However, since the system is multivalued, it will have to be acted upon in many ways, so that any procedure that would assign it a low probability would help to bring in a competing response.
