Tobacco use represents one of the most preventable causes of death nationally. The choice to smoke is often preceded by a response chain in which the smoker first notices smoking-related information (such as the presence of cigarettes) which is followed by initiation of smoking behavior. Underlying the detection of visual information is the attentional orienting system. This system includes both exogenous attentional orienting (or stimulus driven orienting) and endogenous attentional orienting (or goal-directed attentional orienting). Understanding the attentional contingencies of smoking would help us to develop more effective treatments for tobacco addiction. However, we know little about how tobacco intake interacts with attention, particularly attentional orienting. The goal of this research is to examine how smoking and withdrawal from smoking influence the manner in which visual information is extracted from the environment via smoking-related changes in attentional orienting. The proposed study will have two phases. In the first phase, an eye-tracking methodology will be employed to investigate the effects of tobacco on exogenous attentional capture by new objects. In this case, exogenous capture results in automatic eye-movements to a new object location. Phase 2 will use pictures of real scenes with and without tobacco-related information. A change blindness paradigm will be used to determine to which sources of information smokers, non-smokers and deprived smokers observers endogenously direct their attention. The results of these studies will allow for a more complete account of how smoking produces cognitive changes which maintain and support addiction by understanding how smoking influences information extraction from the visual environment. This, in turn, will ultimately allow for the creation of more effective treatment strategies for smoking addiction.
