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I need some assistance with these assignment. nicotine as a cognitive enhancer Thank you in advance for the help!
I need some assistance with these assignment. nicotine as a cognitive enhancer Thank you in advance for the help! The study that is proposed will assist in understanding whether nicotine is a cognitive enhancer. Literature Review The study that this researcher proposes is one that will examine nicotine as a cognitive enhancer. The process that will be studied is how the nicotine patch effects the delivery of nicotine into the body and whether this method is a better way of delivery than smoking. Another question is whether the nicotine patch can rule out health concerns that may happen when nicotine is ingested through cigarettes. The study is projected to create an opportunity to discuss the benefits of nicotine instead of continuing to show that it is always negative. Nicotine and Cognition Many researchers have studied whether nicotine can enhance the cognitive abilities of those people using it and it has been applied to situations where cognition was impaired. As an example, Winga, Bachera, Saccob and Georgea (2011) used nicotine in an experiment with schizophrenic patients. This study used a nicotine patch in order to use the skin as a way for the participants to receive nicotine. The study tested both smokers and non-smokers (non-smokers had history of smoking but were not smoking at time of test) and provided smoking breaks within the process of the study. The researchers found that smoking “ modifies pre-pulse inhibition (PPI) deficits” (p. 323) in schizophrenic patients. In other words, smoking actually helped the cognitive functioning of schizophrenic patients. They also found that patients who smoked had less impairment in neuropsychological task performance and those who did not smoke and more impairment. This study clearly showed that nicotine is a cognitive enhancer in patients who had difficulties staying on task with their cognition. This study is relevant to this researcher’s study because it provides a transdermal patch that is an alternative to smoking the nicotine. The study that is proposed will use the nicotine patch, another alternative way of ingesting nicotine. Ernst, Heishman, Spurgeon and London (2001) state that “tobacco and nicotine have a complex effect on human performance…” (p. 313) which they attribute to whether the individual is currently smoking or whether they have deprived themselves from smoking. The study asked participants to chew two pieces of Nicorette® gum for 15 minutes and to do one chew every three seconds. They where then asked to do a series of computerized cognitive tasks. The researchers found that people who smoked for a long time, had more trouble with cognitive skills than those who did not. In fact, they found that “chronic exposure to nicotine has a deleterious effect on working memory” (p. 317). This insight suggests that too much nicotine actually impairs cognitive functioning instead of enhancing it. This can mean that an experiment using nicotine would have to be monitored so that people did not inhale too much. A limitation of this study was that it was task specific and it could not tell whether someone who was doing other cognitive tasks would have a better outcome than on this one.
