Cognitive Effects of Cigarette Deprivation and Quit Status

Objectives: To study the impact of substance deprivation on a range of cognitive tasks, and compare the effects of imposed deprivation with self-imposed quit attempts. Design: 20 non-smokers, 10 continuing smokers, 13 recently quit smokers and 10 smokers deprived of cigarettes for 12 hours. Method: Participants completed a modified Stroop task (23 smoking and 23 neutral words), a single stimulus pictorial dot probe (ten neutral and five smoking stimuli, presented twice as valid cues and twice as invalid cues), a sustained attention task (respond to eighteen neutral target words, but not to ‘cathedral ’ and ‘cigarette’) and a word generation task (name as many relaxation-related words as possible in two minutes). Ratings of mood and intrusive thought frequency were also collected, before and after the cognitive tasks. Results: Deprived and quit smokers showed similar biases compared with non-smokers and continuing smokers, on colour naming of smoking words and smoking word generation. Only the quit smokers showed a difficulty disengaging from a smoking picture on the single-stimulus dot probe. No effects on sustained attention were observed. Increases in smokin