Commentaries 14!
Cognitive benefits of nicotine: fact or
fiction?
Geoi^e J. Spilich
Newton tells us that a body in motion tends to
remain in motion unless acted upon by some
outside force. Ideas also enjoy inertia; opinions
when stated frequently and with an air of self-as-
surance tend to go unchallenged and even resist
the effects of disconfirming evidence.
West (1993) challenges addiction researchers
to question critically the dogma that nicotine
generally facilitates cognitive performance. He
notes that while smokers tend to report that
smoking reduces stress and aids their cognitive
performance, the data do not unanimously sup-
port such beliefs. How can experts in the fields of
addiction medicine, psychopharmacology and
cognitive neuroscience all investigate the eEfert of
nicotine upon cognitive performance and yet ar-
rive at different conclusions?
One answer lies in the variance in methods
used in research which investigates the effects of
nicotine upon performance. Some of this vari-
ance in methodology is common to all drug
research; differences in drug dosage, method of
administration, subject selection, and other dis-
parities in design and procedure lead to different
patterns of results. Differences in results associ-
ated with this type of procedural variance
provide important information about the
'boundary conditions' of phenomena.
Nicotine research seems to have additional
and perhaps unique procedural sources of vari-
ance, and I hope that by highlighting the most
troublesome of these errors in procedure, I can
help to clarify the muddy waters of discussion.
The most serious and yet easily avoidable of
these methodological errors are: (1) failing to
distinguish deprivation effects from drug effects;
and (2) over-generalization from a restricted
range of performance tasks to global cognitive
effects.
Deprivation or drug effects?
Many addiction researchers are interested in the
effects of a specific drug upon mental processes;
simply put, does the use of a particular drug
affect our mental performance in any regular
way? In order to evaluate the chronic effects of
nicotine upon cognition, one must compare the
performance of habitual users who are given
nicotine with the performance of non-users who
are not given nicotine. Oddly enou^, many
researchers who investigate the effects of smok-
ing upon cognitive performance still insist on
comparing the performance of active smokers
only with that of deprived smokers. In a recent
issue of Psychopkarmacology devoted to nicotine
research (1992, 108, No. 4), five papers dis-
cussed the effects of smokir^ upon cognitive
performance but only Prichard, Robinson &
Guy, (1992) and Sherwood, Kerr & Hindmarch,
(1992) compared the performance of smokers
with a non-smoking control group. The ex-
clusion of a contrast between the performance of
smokers and non-smokers might be warranted if
the focus of the article was to investigate the
effects of smoking or nicotine deprivation upon
the performance of smokers. Although Sherwood
et at. (1992) and Prichard et al. (1992) use the
word 'smoker' in the title of their article and so
imply that their conclusions refer only to the
effects of smoking upon smokers' behavior, oth-
ers are not so careful in either drawing their own
conclusions or in interpreting the work of others.
Comparing the cognitive performance of smok-
ers with deprived smokers allows us to discuss
deprivation effects but does not allow us to gen-
eralize unblushingly that "Tvlicotine can improve
memory by enhancing attention." (Warburton,
Rusted & Fowler, 1992, p. 446). To clearly
separate deprivation effects from drug effects,
researchers must compare the performance of
active smokers with non-smokers; an even better
model would be to compare the performance of
active smokers, deprived smokers and non-
smokers (Spilich, June & Renner, 1992).
Restricting the range of tasks
One of the essential characteristics of a depen-
dent variable is that it be valid; that is, it
measures what it is supposed to measure. Within
this context, it is important for addiction re-
searchers to choose measures of mental function
which reflect the type of processing encountered
in everyday tasks.
Much of the research which investigates the
effects of nicotine upon cognitive performance
has been condurted with a very restrictive set of
tasks such as the Mackworth clock, the RVIP
task, finger tapping tasks, all of which involve a
rapid response to a simple perceptual demand.
142 Commentaries
Consider for a moment the Mackworth clock. In
the typical appiication of this task, a subject
stares for more than an hour at a clock face
without numbers, watching for the second hand
to occasionaJly stuner ahead two 'seconds' rather
than 'one'. Psychopharmacologists who view this
task as a model of the cognitive demands of
every day life must lead an excruciatingly tedious
existence.
I am not arguing that one type of task is
intrinsically better than another nor that every
study should employ a battery of tasks, but gen-
eralizing about the effea of a drug upon
something as broad as cognitive performance
from the results of only one task or one type of
task is a recipe for disaster. Tlieorists in behav-
ioral pharmacology need to base their
generalizations about the cognitive effects of a
drug upon a wide range of tasks which differ in
task demands and complexity.
Conclusions
To the outsider, this discussion concerning
proper methodology for assessing the effects of
smoking and nicotine upon human cognitive
performance might appear to be an esoteric dis-
pute among scientists. In fact, the implications of
methodological errors which lead researchers to
conclude incorrectly that smoking benefits cog-
nitive performance in some general fashion are
both far-reaching and costly. For example, the
1964 US Surgeon General's Report (US
DHEW, 1964), the 1978 WHO report (WHO,
Technical Report Series, No. 618, 1978, p. 8) as
well as the 1984 NIDA repon (US DHHS,
1984, pp. 19-20) concur that disturbances in
cognitive performance are a hallmark of an ad-
dictive substance. If the effects of smoking upon
human cognitive performance are not clearly
understood due to a narrow and confined man-
ner in which research is conducted, our
knowledge of addictive processes will suffer.
GEORGE J. SPUJCH
Psychology Department,
Dunning Science Center,
Washington College,
300 Washington Avenue,
Chestertovm, Maryland 21620, USA.
COLRAIN, I. M., MANGAN, G . L., PEIXET, O . L. &
BATES, T. C. (1992) Effects of post-learning smok-
ing on memory consolidation, Psychopharmacohgyt
108, pp. 448-451.
PRICHARD, W . S., RoBmsoN, J. H. & GUY, T . 0 .
(1992) Enhancement of continuous performance
task reaction time by smoking in non-deprived
smokers, Psydiopharmaccdosy, 108, pp. 437-442.
SHERWOOD, N . KERR, J. S. & HINDMARCH, I. (1992)
Psychomotor performance in smokers following
single and repeated doses of nicotine gum,
P^chopharmacohgy, 308, pp. 432—436.
SFIUCH, G . J., JUNE, L. & RENNER, J. (1992) Cigarette
smoking and cognitive performance, British Journal
oj Addiction, 87, pp. 1313-1326.
US DHEW (1964) Smoking and health, Repon of the
advisory committee to the Surgeon General of the
Public Health Service (Washington, DC, US
Government Printing Office).
US DHHS (J984) Drug abuse and drug abuse research,
DHHS Publication No. (ADM) 85-1374 (Washing-
ton, DC US Government Printing Office).
WARBURTON, D . (1992) Nicotine issues, Psychophar-
macology, 108, pp. 393-396.
WAREURTON, D . M . , RUSTED, J. M. & FO-BTJJR, J.
(1992) A comparison of the anentiona! and consoli-
dation hypotheses for the facilitation of memory by
nicotine, Psychopharmacology, 108, pp. 443-447.
WEST, R. (1993) Beneficial effects of nicotine: fact or
fiction? Addiction, 88, pp. 589-590.
Does cigarette smoking increase stress?
Andy Parrott
One of the issues raised in West's (1993) edi-
torial concerns the role of stress in smoking.
The relationship between cigarette smoking
and feelings of stress has long been a subject for
controversy. This relates to the cotnplex mood
state changes which accompany both cigarette
smoking, and periods without cigarettes. The act
of smoking is generally associated with positive
moods; "Individuals report that they smoke be-
cause it improves their affective state, reducing
negative and/or increasing positive affect"
(Gilbert & Wesler, 1989, p. 188). Whereas vrith-
out access to cigarettes, regular smokers often
experience a range of negative moods, including
irritability, tension, and nervousness. These dele-
terious feeling state changes have been widely
documented dtiring long-term smoking cessation
(Hughes et al., 1990), but it has become increas-
ingly apparent that they also occur quite rapidly
after cigarette extinction. Thus Perkins et al.
(1992) noted that the positive mood effects of
smoking had disappeared 10 minutes after the
last inhalation, in subjects performing a high
challenge (high stress) task.
Various models have been proposed for the