The relationship between these three factors and nicotine addiction will be the focus of this presentation. What We Know Nicotine deprivation can impair attention and cognition and smoking or nicotine can reverse withdrawal-induced deficits. Performance impairment has been observed within 4 hours of tobacco deprivation. Nicotine enhances finger tapping, attention, and under certain conditions, memory. It is well established that nicotine enhances tapping rate and motor responding in tests of focused attention.
Recent evidence indicates that nicotine also enhances sustained attention and recognition memory.
However, no studies have reported enhancement of sensory abilities, selective attention, learning, and other cognitive abilities. Degraded attention and cognition following a period of nicotine deprivation can be a strong motivating factor to smoke to reverse such deficits, thus maintaining nicotine addiction. Nicotine's true enhancement of performance is of secondary importance in the maintenance of addiction because of the modest and limited effects. What We Need To Know More About The full range of conditions under which nicotine affects behavior must be determined. For example, attentional processes have been studied extensively, whereas few studies have examined nicotine's effect on learning.