Smoking and Work Load

Abstract

Smokers, smokers deprived, and nonsmokers performed a compensatory tracking task while simultaneously performing a crossadaptive loading task. By means of the cross-adaptive technique, the size of the subject’s total work load (tracking and loading tasks combined) was individually tailored to utilize each subject’s entire attentional capacity. No differences were detected as a function of smoking condition either in tracking or loading task performance, and it was concluded that smoking condition did not affect the size of the work load which could be handled. Performance generally improved with trials, however, none of the smoking condition × trials interactions was significant, indicating that performance changes with practice did not differ among the various smoking conditions.