Attentional bias and smoking

Research on smoking cue reactivity has increasingly focused on attentional processes engaged by smoking-relevant cues and applying models and methods from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to measure and interpret attentional bias (AB) to these cues. This chapter reviews common research paradigms that have been used to examine various components of smoking-related AB, including modified Stroop tasks, visual/dot probe tasks, eye tracking, and direct neural indexes. We also review empirical findings from these tasks and relationships between AB and clinically relevant smoking indexes. Finally, we describe recent attempts to retrain AB as a potential smoking cessation treatment modality, and we discuss methodological challenges to the wider-scale application and unambiguous interpretation of AB findings.

Duke Scholars

Author Jason A Oliver Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Adult Psychiatry & Psychol ...