The Open Addiction Journal

2011, 4 : 72-75
Published online 2011 December 14. DOI: 10.2174/1874941001104010072
Publisher ID: TOADDJ-4-72

A Comparison of Social (Weekend) Smokers, Regular (Daily) Smokers and a Never-Smoked Group Upon Everyday Prospective Memory

Tom Heffernan and Terence O'Neill
Collaboration for Drug and Alcohol Research (CDAR), Department of Psychology, Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, NE1 8ST, UK.

ABSTRACT

Our previous studies suggested that smokers have a worse performance on everyday prospective memory (PM) tasks than non-smokers. The present study compared regular and social smokers to see if there is a dose-response relationship between smoking and PM. We recruited 28 social (weekend) smokers (SS), 28 regular (daily) smokers (RS) and 28 people who had never smoked (NS) from among social science students who reported no psychiatric or drug and alcohol problems. The participant's PM was assessed by means of a Prospective Remembering Video Procedure (PRVP). After controlling for between-group variations in weekly (moderate) alcohol use, mood and IQ, the findings revealed that NS performed better than RS (F= 1.44, p<0.01) and SS (F= 1.70, p<0.01), with no significant difference between RS and SS (F= 1.00, p=.38).Smokers have a lower performance on our PM task than non-smokers, regardless of the type of smoking pattern.