Smoking and attention: A review and reformulation of the stimulus-filter hypothesis

An accumulation of evidence suggests that smoking may be reinforcing in part, due to nicotine's capacity to enhance attentional processing. Correspondingly, the stimulus-filer model of nicotine reinforcement asserts that nicotine facilitates cognitive performance by acting as a stimulus-barrier, thereby screening irrelevant and annoying stimuli from the smoker's awareness. A review of the available data suggests that while nicotine does appear to reliably enhance sustained, divided, and focused attention, the stimulus-filter model falls short of adequately explaining the findings. An alternative, attention allocation model of nicotine reinforce ment is reviewed the tenets of which suggest that nicotine differentially augments attentional processing via its propensity to: (a) Induce attentional narrowing; and (b) increase perceptual processing capacity. The motivational implications of the model, including smokers' use of nicotine to dampen stress, are discussed. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.