Nicotine is the third most commonly used substance by adolescents and use of electronic cigarettes has become twice as popular as traditional tobacco products (Johnston et al., 2017). Concomitantly, e-cigarettes have been found to increase the risk for transitioning to more traditional tobacco cigarettes (Wills et al., 2016). Although acute administration of nicotine may enhance cognition in teens and young adults, especially memory and attention (Poorthuis et al., 2009), chronic use has been linked with attention and working memory deficits in teens (Goriounova and Mansvelder, 2012; Wagner et al., 2013; Jacobsen et al., 2005; England et al., 2017). Acute withdrawal from nicotine in adolescent users has also been associated with abnormal reward processing (Sweitzer et al., 2016), working memory (Falcone et al., 2014; Merritt et al., 2012), and verbal memory (Jacobsen et al., 2007) fMRI tasks, highlighting the necessity to measure last use of nicotine prior to neurocognitive assessment.
