Acute nicotine administration has been found to transiently improve some areas of neurocognition in NSC and individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, most substantially on measures of sustained attention and working memory [17,19,108]. Acute nicotine administration in nicotine deprived smokers is associated with improved cognitive task performance [109,110], whereas several studies report decrements in neurocognitive performance with nicotine administration to NSC (see [19] for review). A recent meta-analysis conducted by Heishman and colleagues [111] suggests that acute smoking or nicotine consumption, independent of withdrawal effects, is associated with enhanced function in the following domains of function: fine motor skills, alerting attention accuracy and response time, orienting attention reaction time, short-term episodic memory accuracy and working memory reaction time (but not accuracy). In non-clinical chronic smokers, the adverse effects of nicotine withdrawal are not typically apparent on neurocognitive function until 8–12 hours after last nicotine dose [17,19,109,112]. Protracted duration from last cigarette smoked/nicotine administration to onset of withdrawal mediated disturbances in neurocognition is likely attributable to the maintenance of relatively high levels of plasma nicotine during waking hours due to repeated dosing of nicotine (via cigarettes) [113].
