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Effects of cognitive load on neural and behavioral responses to smoking-cue distractors

Overview of attention for article published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, March 2016
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Title
Effects of cognitive load on neural and behavioral responses to smoking-cue distractors
Published in
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, March 2016
DOI 10.3758/s13415-016-0416-5
Pubmed ID
Authors

R. Ross MacLean, Travis T. Nichols, James M. LeBreton, Stephen J. Wilson

Abstract

Smoking cessation failures are frequently thought to reflect poor top-down regulatory control over behavior. Previous studies have suggested that smoking cues occupy limited working memory resources, an effect that may contribute to difficulty achieving abstinence. Few studies have evaluated the effects of cognitive load on the ability to actively maintain information in the face of distracting smoking cues. For the present study, we adapted an fMRI probed recall task under low and high cognitive load with three distractor conditions: control, neutral images, or smoking-related images. Consistent with a limited-resource model of cue reactivity, we predicted that the performance of daily smokers (n = 17) would be most impaired when high load was paired with smoking distractors. The results demonstrated a main effect of load, with decreased accuracy under high, as compared to low, cognitive load. Surprisingly, an interaction revealed that the effect of load was weakest in the smoking cue distractor condition. Along with this behavioral effect, we observed significantly greater activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) in the low-load condition than in the high-load condition for trials containing smoking cue distractors. Furthermore, load-related changes in rIFG activation partially mediated the effects of load on task accuracy in the smoking-cue distractor condition. These findings are discussed in the context of prevailing cognitive and cue reactivity theories. These results suggest that high cognitive load does not necessarily make smokers more susceptible to interference from smoking-related stimuli, and that elevated load may even have a buffering effect in the presence of smoking cues under certain conditions.

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The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 24 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 24 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Ph. D. Student 6 25%
Student > Bachelor 5 21%
Student > Master 3 13%
Student > Doctoral Student 1 4%
Professor 1 4%
Other 3 13%
Unknown 5 21%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Psychology 11 46%
Nursing and Health Professions 1 4%
Sports and Recreations 1 4%
Medicine and Dentistry 1 4%
Neuroscience 1 4%
Other 1 4%
Unknown 8 33%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 28 March 2016.
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#21,500,614
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Outputs from Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience
#899
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Outputs of similar age
#261,974
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Outputs of similar age from Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience
#17
of 21 outputs
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