Eye movements to smoking-related pictures in smokers: relationship between attentional biases and implicit and explicit measures of stimulus valence.

AIMS: To investigate biases in overt orienting of attention to smoking-related cues in cigarette smokers, and to examine the relationship between measures of visual orienting and the affective and motivational valence of smoking cues.
DESIGN: Smokers and non-smokers took part in a single session in which their attentional and evaluative responses to smoking-related and matched control pictures were recorded. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty smokers and 25 non-smokers. MEASUREMENTS: Direction and duration of gaze was measured while participants completed a visual probe task. Subjective and cognitive-experimental measures of the motivational and affective valence of the stimuli were recorded.
FINDINGS: Smokers, but not non-smokers, maintained their gaze for longer on smoking-related pictures than control pictures. They were also faster to detect probes that replaced smoking-related than control pictures, consistent with an attentional bias for smoking-related cues. Furthermore, smokers showed greater preferences for smoking-related than control pictures, compared with non-smokers, on both the subjective (explicit) and cognitive-experimental (implicit) indices of stimulus valence. Within smokers, longer initial fixations of gaze on smoking-related pictures were associated with a bias to rate the smoking pictures more positively, with greater approach tendencies for smoking pictures on the cognitive-experimental task, and with a greater urge to smoke.
CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrate that smokers show biased attentional orientating to smoking cues, which is related to craving and the affective and motivational valence of the stimuli.