Nicotine Deprivation Elevates Neural Representation of Smoking-related Cues in Object-sensitive Visual Cortex: a Proof of Concept Study

Overview

Journal Psychopharmacology (Berl)

Specialty Pharmacology

Date 2017 Apr 22

PMID 28429068

Citations 1

Authors

Anne Havermans

Onno C P van Schayck

Eric F P M Vuurman

Wim J Riedel

Job van den Hurk

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Objective: In the current study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to investigate whether tobacco addiction biases basic visual processing in favour of smoking-related images. We hypothesize that the neural representation of smoking-related stimuli in the lateral occipital complex (LOC) is elevated after a period of nicotine deprivation compared to a satiated state, but that this is not the case for object categories unrelated to smoking.

Methods: Current smokers (≥10 cigarettes a day) underwent two fMRI scanning sessions: one after 10 h of nicotine abstinence and the other one after smoking ad libitum. Regional blood oxygenated level-dependent (BOLD) response was measured while participants were presented with 24 blocks of 8 colour-matched pictures of cigarettes, pencils or chairs. The functional data of 10 participants were analysed through a pattern classification approach.

Results: In bilateral LOC clusters, the classifier was able to discriminate between patterns of activity elicited by visually similar smoking-related (cigarettes) and neutral objects (pencils) above empirically estimated chance levels only during deprivation (mean = 61.0%, chance (permutations) = 50.0%, p = .01) but not during satiation (mean = 53.5%, chance (permutations) = 49.9%, ns.). For all other stimulus contrasts, there was no difference in discriminability between the deprived and satiated conditions.

Conclusion: The discriminability between smoking and non-smoking visual objects was elevated in object-selective brain region LOC after a period of nicotine abstinence. This indicates that attention bias likely affects basic visual object processing.

Citing Articles

Dong G, Zheng H, Liu X, Wang Y, Du X, Potenza M J Behav Addict. 2018; 7(4):953-964.

PMID: 30556781 PMC: 6376376. DOI: 10.1556/2006.7.2018.118.

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