Cue reactivity in smokers: An event-related potential study

• Smokers showed cue reactivity, with more false alarms to cigarette stimuli.
• ERPs indicated that all subjects attended more to cigarette than neutral images.
• ERPs indicated that all subjects viewed cigarette images as more salient.
• ERP indices of salience and attention do not fully account for cue reactivity.

Drugs-of-abuse may increase the salience of drug cues by sensitizing the dopaminergic (DA) system (Robinson and Berridge, 1993), leading to differential attention to smoking stimuli. Event-related potentials (ERPs) have been used to assess attention to smoking cues but not using an ERP component associated with DA-mediated salience evaluation. In this study the DA-related P2a and the P3, were compared in smokers (N = 21) and non-smokers (N = 21) during an attention selection cue exposure task including both cigarette and neutral images. We predicted that both the P2a and P3 would be larger to targets than non-targets, but larger to non-target cigarette images than non-target neutral images only in the smokers, reflecting smokers' evaluation of smoking stimuli as relevant even when they were not targets. Results indicated that smokers showed behavioral cue reactivity, with more false alarms to cigarette images (responding to cigarette images when they were not targets) than non-smokers; however, both smokers and non-smokers had a larger P2a and P3 to cigarette images. Thus, while smokers showed behavioral evidence of differential salience evaluation of the cigarette images, this group difference was not reflected in differential brain activity. These findings may reflect characteristics of the ERPs (both ERP components were smaller in the smokers), the smoking sample (they were not more impulsive, i.e. reward sensitive, than the non-smokers, in contrast to prior studies) and the design (all participants were aware that the aim of the study was related to smoking).