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Recent advances in studies of nicotinic agents in humans have begun to more carefully define cognitive operations that can be influenced by nicotinic stimulation and/or blockade. Careful separation of the cognitive domains affected by nicotinic stimulation has identified attentional performance as the most likely candidate to be positively influenced by nicotinic receptor activation. Studies of the effects of nicotinic systems and/or nicotinic receptor stimulation in pathological disease states such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia show the potential for therapeutic utility of nicotinic drugs. In contrast to studies in pathological states, studies of nicotine in normal-non-smokers tend to show deleterious effects. This contradiction can be resolved by consideration of cognitive and biological baseline dependency differences between study populations in terms …