ABSTRACT
Effect of smoking on performance-A study reported in Spilich et al. (1992) investigated the effects of smoking on performance. Three tasks were used that differ in the level of cognitive processing that was needed to perform them; different participants were observed in each task. The first task involved pattern recognition with participants having to locate a target on a screen. The second was a cognitive task in which the participants had to locate a target on a screen. The third task was a driving simulation video game. In each case the response variable was the number of errors committed by a participant. Participants were further divided into three smoking groups: active smokers (AS) composed of people who actively smoked during or just before the task, delayed smokers (DS) composed of regular smokers who had not smoked for 3 hours before the task and non-smokers (NS). The resulting data, taken from Howell (2002), are shown in Table 5.3.
