Attentional Bias to Smoking Cues: Differences between Active Smokers and Non-Smokers (2011)

Undergraduate: Katherine Cullen

Faculty Advisor: Charlotte Boettiger
Department: Psychology & Neuroscience

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In substance dependent individuals, increased attention toward drug related stimuli is correlated with relapse risk, consumption behavior, and craving levels. Continued study of this effect is important for finding and testing new treatment methods and preventing relapse. In this study we examined the cost to attention toward smoking based stimuli for smokers (S) compared to non-smokers (N). Participants searched for a single target within a rapid stream of images. A task irrelevant smoking or kitchen distracter image preceded the target by either 2 (lag 2) or 8 (lag 8) items. We predicted S would be less accurate at detecting a target when it appeared at lag 2 following a smoking image compared to a kitchen image and that accuracy would be recovered by lag 8. This would demonstrate that the attention of S was captured and held by the smoking image. Although results show that N are less accurate overall, there is a larger disparity in accuracy at lag 2 between smoking distracters and kitchen distracters for S (N: kitchen=84%; smoking=80%; S: kitchen=87%; smoking= 81%). Although S are performing worse at lag 2 when the distracter is a smoking image, we lacked the statistical power to detect the predicted significant interaction between lag and picture type (p=0.157; F=2.774). Overall, the results show that attentional biases toward smoking stimuli among S induce a temporary inability to process subsequent targets.