Abstract
Rationale
The present paper asked first whether the cholinergic agonist nicotine improves memory for delayed intentions (prospective memory, ProM) and second whether pharmacological dissociation would support the psychological distinction that is made between strategic (effortful) and automatic (non-effortful) intention activation in prospective memory.
Objectives
To use nicotine as a pharmacological tool with which to examine the neurochemical bases of prospective memory and to dissociate strategic from automatic components of ProM retrieval.
Methods
In three experiments, minimally deprived (2 h) smokers either smoked or abstained prior to completing a standard prospective memory study. This involved participants in the simultaneous processing of a ProM task and a cover task (ongoing between the setting and the recall of the intention). Here, the ongoing task involved lexical decision (LDT), while the ProM task required a response to pre-specified target items occurring within the LDT stimuli. Variations in task instructions were used to manipulate the processing requirements of the ProM task, the attention allocated to the ProM task and the balance of importance assigned to the ongoing and ProM tasks.
Results
In experiment 1, where the ProM processing was automatic, nicotine did not improve ProM accuracy. In experiment 2, where the ProM task involved strategic processing, positive effects of nicotine were observed. In experiment 3, we covaried ProM task instructions, assigned task importance and nicotine conditions. We observed a main effect of nicotine on ProM accuracy, a main effect of task on ProM accuracy and a main effect of assigned task importance on ProM accuracy. There were no interactions between the factors.
Conclusions
Employing both direct and indirect manipulations of strategic engagement, we demonstrated nicotine-induced enhancement of performance on the ProM task. The results are consistent with the view that relatively small changes in instruction and in task variables engage strategic processing in a ProM task and that when these conditions stretch cognitive resources, nicotine may significantly improve performance.
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Notes
Following Brandimonte et al. (2001), we used LDT median reaction times for each participant to avoid distortion by outliers in the reaction time data.
Volunteers were not asked to confirm/disconfirm their ProM task compliance, as post-test statements are often biased by subjective assessment of performance accuracy or experimenter intentions. Arguments can be found for both techniques (omitting non-responders; using post-session confirmation as the basis for omission) in the ProM literature.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the constructive input from Matthias Kliegel, Louise Phillips and two anonymous reviewers in the development of this paper. No authors have anything to disclose with regard to financial or other conflicts of interest.
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Rusted, J.M., Trawley, S., Heath, J. et al. Nicotine improves memory for delayed intentions. Psychopharmacology 182, 355–365 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-005-0109-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-005-0109-1