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.