The general aims of this project are to gain further insight into (1) the effects of cigarette smoking and smoking urges on higher-level cognitive processes, particularly working memory and language comprehension and (2) the acquisition and potential decay (after smoking cessation) of the memory representations involved in the creation and maintenance of smoking urges. The theoretical framework of this research consists of cue reactivity theories of drug urges and multi-component models of working memory. In this framework, drug urges are conceptualized as the result of the activation of smoking-related memory representations that, once activated by a cue, are difficult to suppress for the addict, whereby the activity of suppression may lead to interference with cognitive processes such as working memory operations used in language comprehension. Research conducted by the principal investigator as part of a B/START grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse provides initial support for this hypothesis in showing that smoking urges interfere with sentence comprehension. This research has also raised several new questions that the current proposal is intended to address. First, it is not clear at this point with which sentence comprehension processes in working memory smoking urges interfere. Two possibilities are that smoking urges interfere with the central executive, which allocates processing resources or with the phonological loop, which briefly stores verbal information. Second, it is not known at this point how long the cognitive effects of smoking urges persist. Third, although smoking urges may affect the comprehension of unrelated sentences, nothing is known about how smoking urges affect complex and more ecologically valid language comprehension tasks, such as text comprehension. Fourth, nothing is known about how the memory bias that may lead to smoking urges is acquired by smokers and about whether and how this bias decays after smoking cessation. The proposed project will systematically address these questions. This project has substantial theoretical and practical relevance. In the theoretical arena, it will greatly enhance our understanding of the effects of smoking urges on cognitive processing, as well as our understanding of the factors affecting the acquisition and decay of memory representations supporting smoking urges. In the practical arena, the project will provide insight into the potentially harmful effects of smoking urges on educationally relevant tasks. It might furthermore lead to the development of a cognitive tool for assessing smoking addiction.
| Yaxley, Richard H; Zwaan, Rolf A (2005) Attentional bias affects change detection. Psychon Bull Rev 12:1106-11 |
| Madden, C J; Zwaan, R A (2001) The impact of smoking urges on working memory performance. Exp Clin Psychopharmacol 9:418-24 |
| Zwaan, R A; Truitt, T P (2000) Inhibition of smoking-related information in smokers and nonsmokers. Exp Clin Psychopharmacol 8:192-7 |
| Zwaan, R A; Stanfield, R A; Madden, C J (2000) How persistent is the effect of smoking urges on cognitive performance? Exp Clin Psychopharmacol 8:518-23 |
