Cue-reactivity and attentional bias in smokers and non-smokers: an ERP-study.

This thesis discusses enhanced cue-reactivity in smokers as a result of an attentional bias. Cue-reactivity is tested by means of event-related potentials using a passive viewing task and a dot-probe attentional task. Twenty smoking subjects and twenty-one non-smoking subjects were included in the analysis. Results of the passive task showed that smoking-related cues elicited an enhanced P3, which is a marker of cue-reactivity in smokers. This was not the case in non-smokers. However, evidence for an attentional bias was not present in behavioral results of the dot-probe task. The accompanying ERPs showed no such results either. This was probably caused by the inhibition of return effect, which causes subjects to perform an additional attention shift. The occurrence of this effect was due to too large cue-target onset asynchronies. A feasible combination of ERP and dot-probe tasks therefore seems difficult to obtain.