An electrophysiological dissociation of craving and stimulus-dependent attentional capture in smokers

Abstract

It has been suggested that over the course of an addiction, addiction-related stimuli become highly salient in the environment, thereby capturing an addict's attention. To assess these effects neurally in smokers, and how they interact with craving, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) in two sessions: one in which participants had just smoked (noncraving), and one in which they had abstained from smoking for 3 h (craving). In both sessions, participants performed a visual-search task in which two colored squares were presented to the left and right of fixation, with one color being the target to which they should shift attention and discriminate the locations of two missing corners. Task-irrelevant images, both smoking-related and non-smoking-related, were embedded in both squares, enabling the shift of spatial attention to the target to be examined as a function of the addiction-related image being present or absent in the target, the distractor, or both. Behaviorally, participants were slower to respond to targets containing a smoking-related image. Furthermore, when the target contained a smoking-related image, the neural responses indicated that attention had been shifted less strongly to the target; when the distractor contained a smoking-related image, the shift of attention to the contralateral target was stronger. These effects occurred independently of craving and suggest that participants were actively avoiding the smoking-related images. Together, these results provide an electrophysiological dissociation between addiction-related visual-stimulus processing and the neural activity associated with craving.

Electroencephalography reveals a selective disruption of cognitive control processes in craving cigarette smokers

“…As we found previously (Donohue, Woldorff, et al, ), craving has a general effect on overall arousal. Here, when we examined the effects of craving on the P1 component in response to the cue stimuli, we found that this component was (marginally) enhanced when participants were in a state of craving.…”

“…That is, craving could still operate in a non‐specific manner, altering all attention and cognitive control processes, with behavioural ramifications only showing up for certain cognitive control tasks. In a previous study (Donohue, Woldorff, et al, ), we observed that when smokers were in a state of craving, they had an enhanced sensory‐evoked P1, suggesting a higher general level of arousal. Surprisingly, this had no consequences for an attentional‐shift‐related task, with smokers showing comparable behavioural and neural effects in both sated and craving conditions.…”

“…For the cue period, the initial sensory‐evoked responses (the P1 at occipital sites O1 and O2 from 110 to 150 ms) were examined as a function of task, the feedback from the previous trial, and craving. Based on our previous work, we hypothesized that craving would influence this component (Donohue, Woldorff, et al, ). The time window and sites were selected by collapsing across both sessions/conditions and visually inspecting the data to see the location/time of the first occipitally located positive‐going deflection in the data, and taking ±20 ms around the peak.…”

Mind-wandering Is Accompanied by Both Local Sleep and Enhanced Processes of Spatial Attention Allocation

“…That is, a larger N2pc, typically associated with a stronger focusing onto the target and potentially reflecting better distractor suppression ( Mazza et al. 2009 ; Donohue et al. 2016 ), might have partially compensated for the MW.…”

An electrophysiological marker of the desire to quit in smokers

“…The specific task used was a rare‐target detection task, to which subjects only had to make a response about 10% of the time, enabling us to examine the responses to the non‐target stimuli (standards) without any contamination from motor‐related activity, while still having the target‐related responses present on a small percentage of trials. In response to the target stimuli, we predicted to see that the P300 component, previously observed to be insensitive to the probability of a reward in addicts (Morie et al ., ), would not be sensitive to the task conditions (purportedly bringing participants closer to or farther away from their reward of smoking), but might rather show an enhancement in the craving condition during which overall arousal may have been higher (Donohue et al ., ). In response to the standard stimuli, we expected to see a frontal component similar to a cue‐related negativity (Morie et al ., , ), with such a negative process likely having an extended duration, as has been observed in addicts in a response to substance‐related cues (Littel et al ., ) that likely induce craving (Carter & Tiffany, ).…”