SMOKING AND RAVEN IQ

Nicotine has recently been shown to enhance measures of information pr ocessing speed including the decision time (DT) component of simple an d choice reaction time and the string length measure of evoked potenti al waveform complexity. Both (DT and string length) have been previous ly demonstrated to correlate with performance on standard intelligence tests (IQ). We therefore hypothesised that nicotine is acting to impr ove intellectual performance on the elementary information processing correlates of IQ. In the current experiment we tested this hypothesis using the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) test. APM scores w ere significantly higher in the smoking session compared to the non-sm oking session, suggesting that nicotine acts to enhance physiological processes underlying performance on intellectual tasks.