Cigarette smoking and cognitive performance.

While some investigations into the relationship between smoking and cognitive performance have reported that smoking facilitates performance, other research has come to the opposite conclusion. A review of the literature suggests that this variance in results may be due to differences among studies in design (comparing smokers only with deprived smokers rather than with non-smokers) and also to differences in task demands. Therefore, performance of smokers having just smoked, matched smokers deprived for a brief period, and also non-smokers was contrasted on a series of tasks which ranged from repetitive and perceptually-bound tasks to complex, dynamic tasks dependent upon long-term memory. It was found that while cigarette smoking had no negative effect upon performance for simple perceptual tasks, smoking was found to exert measurable negative effects upon performance for more complex information processing tasks.