Effects of nicotine on perceptual speed

Abstract

Two experiments investigating the effects of nicotine on performance in the inspection time (IT) procedure are reported. Experiment 1 compared ITs in smoking (0.8 mg nicotine cigarette), sham-smoking, and no-smoking conditions. IT was significantly shorter in the smoking condition as compared to both the no-smoking or sham-smoking conditions, suggesting that nicotine enhances early information processing. This result is of particular interest because of the correlation between IT and IQ reported in previous experiments. The nicotine related decrease in IT raises the possibility that nicotine enhances at least a subset of the physiological processes underlying intellectual performance. Experiment 2 examined the persistence of this nicotine related enhancement in IT, and investigated the effects of nicotine across 480 IT trials. Results suggested that ITs derived from the last third of the 480 trials were significantly shorter in the 0.8 mg cigarette condition than in no-smoking condition. The results from these two experiments, taken together with recent work examining the effects of nicotine on the string length measure of AEP waveform complexity and Hick decision time (DT), and studies investigating cognitive functioning and cholinergic system dysfunction in dementia, suggest a role of the cholinergic system in intellectual performance.

Acute effects of nicotine on visual search tasks in young adult smokers

“…This may reflect simply that target absent trials take longer on average, and are likely to benefit from the sustained attentional effort that nicotine promotes. These findings are in line with previous research demonstrating effects of nicotine on low level perceptual processes (Thomson et al 2002;Stough 1995) and also suggest that nicotine may impact on higher level processes such as those involved in the strategic allocation of attention. In order to explore these effects further, experiment 2 used a considerably more demanding search task combined with detailed analysis of eye-movements and a more robust, crossover, within-subjects design.…”

“…In experiment 1 pop-out visual search became faster following nicotine, suggesting an effect on low-level stimulus processing similar to that reported by Thomson et al (2002) and Stough (1995) using an IT paradigm. These faster search times were not seen to the same extent in the serial searches in experiment 1, or in experiment 2, implying that one action of nicotine may be to speed up visual search when the target can be quickly discriminated from distracters.…”

“…For example, nicotine administration leads to faster rates of finger-tapping (West and Jarvis 1986), decreased reaction times (Bates et al 1994;Witte et al 1997, Greisar et al 2002 and improved performance on visual discrimination tasks such as the inspection time (IT) paradigm (Thomson et al 2002;Stough 1995). Nicotine has also been shown to prevent the performance decrement usually seen over time in simple tests of sustained attention such as the Mackworth Clock (Wesnes et al 1983), and to prevent fatigue-related decline in performance overnight (Parkin et al 1998).…”

Acute cognitive effects of donepezil in young, healthy volunteers

“…After donepezil ingestion visual IT improved at 90 min post-drug, before peak-plasma concentration, supporting earlier findings with donepezil at this very period after drug ingestion (Hutchison et al, 2001), and with nicotinic agonists (Stough et al, 1995;Thompson et al, 2000), as well as partial improvement with donepezil following nicotinic receptor antagonism (Thompson et al, 2000). These positive changes in IT following donepezil may reflect enhanced selective visual attention at encoding that has been related to increases in acetylcholine (Hasselmo and Stern, 2006;Furey et al, 2000aFurey et al, ,b, 2008a, or more specifically increases in bottom-up attentional processing (see Furey et al, 2008b).…”

Nicotine Impairs Spatial Working Memory while Leaving Spatial Attention Intact

“…This is especially important in light of the possibility that nicotine may differentially affect different stages of information processing (Stough et al 1995). Possibility of differential effects in the early and late stages of information processing would be particularly troublesome for a test such as a working memory paradigm with a delayed response design.…”