Associations between the Willingness to Exert Cognitive Effort and Smoking Abstinence

In decision-making tasks, individuals who prefer smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards (delay discounting) are less likely to quit smoking. Indeed, decision-making tasks with delayed reward costs are sensitive to many aspects of substance use disorders. However, other reward costs might also be important. Our study focused on one of these other reward costs, which was cognitive effort (CE). 22 current smokers who were anticipating quitting in the near future were recruited to validate if more CE discounting predicted shorter abstinence times in reinforced smoking lapse period. Each participant had to be over the age of 21, and smoke an average of 10 or more cigarettes daily. Before the smoking lapse period, participants competed a control or regulated ego depletion task, which the regulated version was characterized to lower self-control. It was suspected that participants with larger values of the areas under the curve (AUC) of the CE discounting task would have shorter abstinence times. It would be especially true for the individuals that had self-control lowered by the regulated version of the ego-depletion task. The results show that there was no correlation between the CE discounting task and abstinence times of the lapse periods, but the experiment shows excellent replicability between the two sessions each participant completed. Authors: Austin A. Phanouvong, Darby K. Dyar, Suzanne H. Mitchell Presenter: Austin A. Phanouvon