The study by researchers from Trinity College and the Research Institute for a Tobacco Free Society, Dublin, Ireland, compared former smokers to current smokers and non-smokers.
Functional MRI images were obtained while current smokers, former smokers and never smokers performed tasks designed to assess specific cognitive skills that were reasoned to be important for smoking abstinence.
These included a response inhibition task to assess impulse control and the ability to monitor one's behaviour and an attention task, which assessed the ability to avoid distraction from smoking-related images, which tend to elicit an automatic attention response in smokers.
