Effects Of Nicotine On Implicit And Explicit Memory

Nicotine is a kind of neural active material.It reaches brain through the blood transmission.Then,it leads to changes of neurotransmitter transmission and concentration when nicotine into the body.Further,people's psychology and behavior are affected.A wide range of studies have shown that intake of nicotine has a certain impact on a variety of psychological functions.In the aspect of memory,the studies show that smoker's memory ability decreased significantly after ban smoking.Afterwards,there are different changes after smoking according different conditions.Memory is divided into implicit memory and explicit memory.There is an open question remains as to whether implicit memory and explicit memory are belong to the same memory system.The studies found that the same factors can cause different effects for implicit memory and explicit memory.However,the question that whether the effect of nicotine for implicit memory is consistent with effect of nicotine for explicit memory needs to be further studies.So,in present study,we researched the effects of nicotine on implicit memory and explicit memory by used recognition task and lexical decision task.The study used behavioral experiment and ERP experiment.The results showed that the use of nicotine before encoding can affect deep processing of explicit memory.But it does not have an impact on the shallow processing.The use of nicotine before retrieval can affect both deep and shallow processing.The effects of implicit memory are similar to that of explicit memory.The use of nicotine before encoding just can affect deep processing of implicit memory.But the degree of the use of nicotine before retrieval is stronger than explicit memory.The findings in ERP experiment are consistent to behavioral experiment.It appears that the use of nicotine before encoding can affect N400 amplitude of explicit memory under deep processing condition.But it does not affect that under shallow processing condition.The use of nicotine before retrieval has no effect on deep or shallow processing.However,P600 amplitude is affected under all conditions.It shows that nicotine affects the conceptual priming under deep processing condition.And Nicotine affects the familiarity under all conditions.The N400 amplitude of implicit memory has similar results.So,the results of present study support implicit memory and explicit memory belong to the same memory system.