title: Small effects of smoking on visual spatiotemporal processing.
abstract: Nicotine is an important stimulant that is involved in modulating many neuronal processes, including those related to vision. Nicotine is also thought to play a key role in schizophrenia: A genetic variation of the cholinergic nicotine receptor gene, alpha-7 subunit (CHRNA7) has been shown to be associated with stronger backward masking deficits in schizophrenic patients. In this study, we tested visual backward masking in healthy smokers and non-smokers to further understand the effects of nicotine on spatiotemporal vision. In the first study, we tested 48 participants, a group of non-smokers (n = 12) and three groups of regular smokers that were either nicotine deprived (n = 12), non-deprived (n = 12) or deprived but were allowed to smoke a cigarette directly before the start of the experiment (n = 12). Performance was similar across groups, except for some small negative effects in nicotine-deprived participants. In the second study, we compared backward masking performance between regular smokers and non-smokers for older (n = 37, 13 smokers) and younger (n = 67, 21 smokers) adults. Older adults performed generally worse than younger adults but there were no significant differences in performance between smokers and non-smokers. Taken together, these findings indicate that nicotine has no long-term negative effects on visual spatiotemporal processing as determined by visual backward masking.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Cognitive Neurosciences, Agricultural University of Georgia, Tbilisi, Georgia.
authors.forename: Marina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kunchulia
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.
authors.forename: Karin S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Pilz
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
authors.forename: Michael H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Herzog
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009538:Nicotine / Q000009:adverse effects*; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000139:chemically induced; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D012906:Smoke / Q000009:adverse effects; D012907:Smoking / Q000009:adverse effects*; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis; D014026:Nicotiana / Q000009:adverse effects; D014785:Vision, Ocular / Q000187:drug effects*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000187:drug effects*
chemical_list: D012906:Smoke; D009538:Nicotine