Abstract
Rationale
According to recent theories of addiction, nicotine deprivation may influence biases in the orienting and maintenance of attention on smoking-related cues.
Objectives
We examined the effect of nicotine deprivation on different aspects of attentional biases for smoking-related cues.
Methods
Smokers’ eye movements to smoking-related and control pictures were assessed during a visual probe task under deprived and non-deprived conditions.
Results
When deprived, smokers maintained their gaze for longer on smoking-related than control cues, relative to when non-deprived. Deprivation also increased craving and pleasantness ratings of smoking cues. Across both deprived and non-deprived conditions, smokers were more likely to shift their gaze towards smoking cues and were faster to respond to probes replacing smoking cues, relative to non-smoking cues, but these attentional bias measures were not significantly affected by the deprivation manipulation.
Conclusions
Results suggest a selective effect of deprivation on the maintenance of attention on smoking-related cues.
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Notes
Results of the stimulus–response compatibility task will not be discussed as they were confounded by the order in which participants completed deprived and non-deprived sessions. Details of this task and the results are available on request from the authors.
The use of a 3 SD cut-off was applied to the dwell time and manual RT data, which is consistent with cut-offs used in previous research (Mogg et al. 2003).
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust to Brendan Bradley and Karin Mogg (ref. 057076). Karin Mogg holds a Wellcome Senior Research Fellowship in Basic Biomedical Science.
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Field, M., Mogg, K. & Bradley, B.P. Eye movements to smoking-related cues: effects of nicotine deprivation. Psychopharmacology 173, 116–123 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-003-1689-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-003-1689-2