The effects of smoking on performance on the Garner speeded classification task

✍ Scribed by Andrew J. Waters

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 264 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6222
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1077(1998100)13:7<477::aid-hup23>3.0.co;2-i

✦ Synopsis

The Stroop task has been used by several investigators to examine the eects of nicotine and smoking on human selective attention, but this research has produced inconclusive results. In this article a new task is described, the Garner speeded classi®cation task, that can be used to explore the in¯uences of nicotine on human selective attention in a more detailed fashion than has been reported previously. In a study using this task reported here, 52 smokers performed the Garner task twice. Half the subjects smoked a cigarette between the ®rst and second completion of the task, and the remainder did not smoke. The main ®ndings were that smoking reduced the size of Garner interference for both reaction time and error measures, and that smoking reduced the size of Stroop interference for the error measure but not the reaction time measure. The degree of nicotine deprivation of the subjects at testing did not substantially aect this result. Moreover, there was a suggestion that the eect of smoking on Stroop interference was secondary to the eect on Garner interference, indicating that smoking, and thus presumably nicotine, principally attenuates the disruptive in¯uence of task-irrelevant, but varying, dimensions in selection.