Effects of nicotine on response inhibition and interference control

Abstract

Nicotine is a cholinergic agonist with known pro-cognitive effects in the domains of alerting and orienting attention. However, its effects on attentional top-down functions such as response inhibition and interference control are less well characterised. Here, we investigated the effects of 7 mg transdermal nicotine on performance on a battery of response inhibition and interference control tasks. A sample of N = 44 healthy adult non-smokers performed antisaccade, stop signal, Stroop, go/no-go, flanker, shape matching and Simon tasks, as well as the attentional network test (ANT) and a continuous performance task (CPT). Nicotine was administered in a within-subjects, double-blind, placebo-controlled design, with order of drug administration counterbalanced. Relative to placebo, nicotine led to significantly shorter reaction times on a prosaccade task and on CPT hits but did not significantly improve inhibitory or interference control performance on any task. Instead, nicotine had a negative influence in increasing the interference effect on the Simon task. Nicotine did not alter inter-individual associations between reaction times on congruent trials and error rates on incongruent trials on any task. Finally, there were effects involving order of drug administration, suggesting practice effects but also beneficial nicotine effects when the compound was administered first. Overall, our findings support previous studies showing positive effects of nicotine on basic attentional functions but do not provide direct evidence for an improvement of top-down cognitive control through acute administration of nicotine at this dose in healthy non-smokers.

Nicotine dependence (trait) and acute nicotinic stimulation (state) modulate attention but not cognitive control: converging fMRI evidence from Go-Nogo and Flanker tasks

“…Rather than a blanket inability to engage cognitive and attentional resources, the deficit appears specific to conditions where only relatively minimal attention is required. The robust effects 14 on attention that we report are in line with literature on attention-enhancing effects of nicotine 14,41 and problems with sustained attention in smokers [42][43][44][45] .…”

“…Some studies report worse cognitive control performance in smokers 30,31,47 , while others did not 33,48,49 . Studies manipulating satiety within-subject similarly reported mixed results for cognitive control tasks 42,44 .…”

Neural impact of low-level alcohol use on response inhibition: An fMRI investigation in young adults

“…Separate ANCOVAS were performed on reaction time data, errors of commission, and errors of omission using current nicotine, current marijuana, and prenatal alcohol as covariates, which were selected given that these variables have been shown to impact performance on inhibitory responding tasks, such as the Go/No-Go (Burden et al, 2010;Ettinger et al, 2017;Hatchard et al, 2015;Luijten, Little, & Franken, 2011;Smith et al, 2011;Wrege et al, 2014;Zhao et al, 2016). Other variables that have been shown to impact response inhibition, like age and education, did not warrant inclusion as covariates in the analyses, as there was little variability on these measures between groups (in terms of standard errors), while the selected drug exposure covariates did show variability between groups.…”

Computational dissociation of dopaminergic and cholinergic effects on action selection and inhibitory control

“…While the effects of nicotine on antisaccades have been investigated previously (25–34; 67; 68), to our knowledge, this is the first antisaccade study applying a more general pro-cholinergic drug (as an AChE inhibitor, galantamine raises ACh levels in general). Our findings replicate previous studies in which nicotine was found to reduce antisaccade RT (25; 27; 28; 30; 33).…”