Perinatal Attentional Retraining Intervention for Smoking for Minority Women

Cognitive bias modification (CBM) procedures are interventions aimed at changing the impulsive (automatic) processes that underlie unhealthy behaviors such as smoking. AR is the most commonly used CBM intervention in the study of addiction-related attentional bias. The idea behind AR is to reduce attentional bias and therefore minimize exposure to drug cues, because attention to such stimuli may provoke craving and undermine cessation attempts.

The visual probe (VP) task can measure attentional bias for drug-related cues. In the typical VP task, a pair of pictures or words (e.g. one smoking-related and one neutral) is briefly presented simultaneously side by side on a computer screen. After the pictures disappear, a probe stimulus (e.g. a small dot) is presented in the location that had been occupied by one of the pictures (or words), and participants are required to press a key as quickly as possible in response to the probe. Attentional bias for drug-related cues is detected by a faster response to a probe that replaces a drug-related stimulus (vs. a neutral stimulus), since attention will have been preferentially allocated to that area of visual display. The traditional VP task only assesses attentional bias, and does not modify it in any way.