Do not quote . ATTENTIONAL BIAS AFFECTS CHANGE DETECTION

Thirty smokers and 30 nonsmokers participated in a “flicker” study to examine the role of attentional bias in change detection. Participants observed picture-pairs of everyday objects flicker on the computer screen until they detected the one object that changed. In half of the pictures, a smoking-related object (e.g., lighter) was included among smoking-unrelated objects (e.g., spoon). Half of the smokers and half of the nonsmokers were aware of the experiment’s focus and the other half were not. Smokers exhibited shorter detection latencies than non-smokers when a smoking object changed, longer detection latencies when a non-smoking object changed while a smoking object was present, and detection latencies similar to nonsmokers when smoking objects were not present. Interestingly, nonsmokers displayed the same attentional bias as smokers when they were aware of the experiment’s smoking focus, but they did not display any attentional bias when they were unaware. Thus, these findings provide evidence for long-term context independent as well as for short-term context-dependent