Acute nicotine fails to alter event‐related potential or behavioral performance indices of auditory distraction in cigarette smokers

Abstract

Behavioral studies have shown that nicotine enhances performance in sustained attention tasks, but they have not shown convincing support for the effects of nicotine on tasks requiring selective attention or attentional control under conditions of distraction. We investigated distractibility in 14 smokers (7 females) with event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral performance measures extracted from an auditory discrimination task requiring a choice reaction time response to short- and long-duration tones, both with and without embedded deviants. Nicotine gum (4 mg), administered in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover design, failed to counter deviant-elicited behavioral distraction (i.e., slower reaction times and increased response errors), and it did not influence the distracter-elicited mismatch negativity, the P300a, or the reorienting negativity ERP components reflecting acoustic change detection, involuntary attentional switching, and attentional reorienting, respectively. Results are discussed in relation to a stimulus-filter model of smoking and in relation to future research directions.

The effects of nicotine on the attentional modification of the acoustic startle response in nonsmokers

“…More generally, there are few studies assessing nicotine's effect on focused attention, directly or indirectly via smoking, and they have produced mixed results. In deprived smokers, transdermal nicotine (Mancuso et al, 1999) and smoking (e.g., Domino & Kishimoto, 2002) increased focused attention, though similar studies found no effect using subcutaneous injection (Foulds et al, 1996) and nicotine gum (Knott et al, 2006). In non-smokers a subcutaneous injection of nicotine improved focused attention on an ERP task (Le Houezec et al, 1994).…”

Modulation of auditory deviance detection by acute nicotine is baseline and deviant dependent in healthy nonsmokers: a mismatch negativity study

“…In SZ, nicotine has exerted no effect on pitch deviant MMNs (Dulude et al ., ) but has shortened the latency of the intensity deviant MMN (Fisher et al ., ) and normalized the duration MMN by increasing amplitude to a level comparable to that of controls (Dulude et al ., ). In healthy volunteers, although both non‐significant (Knott et al ., , ) and diminishing amplitude effects have been observed with the pitch deviant MMN following acute nicotine administration (Knott et al ., ), this MMN has generally been found to exhibit a shortened latency (Inami et al ., , ; Dunbar et al ., ) and/or an increased amplitude (Harkrider and Hedrick, ; Dunbar et al ., ) with nicotine or nAChR agonist treatment. Nicotine has also enhanced MMN elicited by auditory pattern (Baldeweg et al ., ) and temporal (interstimulus interval) deviants (Martin et al ., ) as well as by visual deviants (Fisher et al ., ).…”

An acute dose, randomized trial of the effects of CDP-Choline on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) in healthy volunteers stratified by deviance detection level

“…Strongly dependent on glutamatergic signaling, MMN is attenuated in rats, monkeys and healthy adults with high-affinity NMDA (N-methyl-Daspartate)-type glutamate receptor antagonists (Javitt et al, 1996;Tikhonravov et al 2008;Umbricht et al 2000) such as ketamine which, when combined with nicotine, fails to disrupt MMN in some but not all investigations (Mathalon et al 2014). Most frequently investigated in healthy participants with frequency deviants, nicotinic stimulation has resulted in negative (Knott et al 2006, diminishing (Knott et al 2009) and enhancing effects on MMN amplitude (Dunbar et al 2007), with the latter positive outcome also being shown with pattern (Baldeweg et al 2006), temporal (Martin et al 2009) and visual deviants . Such response variability is also seen in the relatively few studies in SZ, with nicotine not affecting frequency deviant MMN (Dulude et al 2010;Inami et al 2007), shortening latency of intensity-deviant MMN ) and in our work, "normalizing" durationdeviant MMN by increasing the diminished MMN in patients to a level comparable to that seen in healthy volunteers (Dulude et al 2010).…”