The effect of smoking/nicotine on response selection

✍ Scribed by Michael E. Houlihan; Walter S. Pritchard; John H. Robinson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 100 KB
• Volume: 14
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6222
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1077(199901)14:1<31::aid-hup61>3.0.co;2-1

✦ Synopsis

Nicotine taken by ad lib smoking or other routes of administration has been reported to shorten reaction time (RT) in many cognitive tasks. Most of these tasks have used visually presented stimuli and require a simple motor response such as a button press. The reliance on this type of RT task makes it dicult to determine the speci®c stage(s) aected by smoking/nicotine. Event-related potential studies indicate that visual perceptual processing is faster after smoking/ nicotine. However, recent studies indicated that the magnitude of this enhancement is not sucient to explain the total improvement in RT performance due to smoking/nicotine. These studies suggest that a signi®cant performanceenhancement eect may occur after the decision or classi®cation of stimuli is completed. The next logical step in the information processing chain is response selection. We examined the eect of smoking/nicotine on response selection in a stimulus-response compatibility task. In this double-blind study, easy response-selection RTs were facilitated by smoking/nicotine but dicult response-selection RTs were not.