The Effects of Smoking on Time Estimation Performance.

摘要

Two investigations were conducted to detemine the effects of nicotine on the processing of visually presented information. In both studies, fifteen chronic smokers were tested under smoking and smoking deprived conditions, and ten nonsmokers were tested as a control group. The results indicated that nicotine had an adverse effect on the ability of subjects to perform this task, but only under certain extreme conditions of object speed and viewing time. These results were compared to previous research where detrimental nicotine effects were found over a wide range of speed and concealment values when a similar task was presented peripherally. Subjects were required to estimate the velocity of a moving target and fire ahead of it to compensate for the time lag in a projectile trajectory. Smoking and smoking deprived subjects differed only under certain speed and exposure time conditions, but in this case, the smokers actually performed better than the deprived smokers. It was suggested that the higher level of information processing involved in this task was not adversely affected by nicotine.