Smoking and performance--a puff-by-puff analysis.

A new version of the Rapid Visual Information Processing (RVIP) task has been developed in this laboratory to examine the effects of each puff from a cigarette upon continuous performance. Two cigarettes were tested and compared with a not-smoking and a sham-smoking control. The results show improvements resulting from just two puffs both in terms of correct detections and reaction times. Both measures of performance were maintained at a higher level during and after smoking, compared with not-smoking and sham-smoking.