Effects of Smoking and Smoking Deprivation on the Articulatory Loop of Working Memory

✍ Scribed by JONATHAN BLAKE; ANDREW SMITH

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 101 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6222
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1077(199705/06)12:3<259::aid-hup866>3.0.co;2-f

✦ Synopsis

This study examined the eects of smoking and smoking deprivation on the articulatory loop of working memory. Forty subjects (20 smokers and 20 non-smokers) performed tasks involving serial recall of letters on two occasions 1 week apart. In each test one part was conducted with articulatory suppression and the other without it. The smokers completed one test following 12 h of smoking deprivation, and the other after smoking a cigarette. The order of suppression/non-suppression conditions and the order of smoking and smoking deprivation were balanced across subjects. The results showed that deprived smokers performed signi®cantly worse than both smoking smokers and non-smokers in the task without suppression. Although all the subjects performed signi®cantly worse whilst under articulatory suppression, smoking status was not found to in¯uence performance here. These results imply that smoking has the eect of returning the smoker to a comparable level of performance to that seen in non-smokers, and suggest that smoking abstinence has a negative eect when performance involves the articulatory loop.