Hypothesis
Daily smokers would show greater attentional bias towards smoking images than non-daily smokers, a trait-like difference in addictive behaviour.
What failed
Comparing 106 daily and 60 non-daily smokers online on a visual probe task at 200 ms and 500 ms presentation, confirmatory analyses found no significant effects of interest, and equivalence testing showed the effects were statistically equivalent to zero.
Broken assumption
Attentional bias to smoking cues is a stable trait difference between smoker groups, measurable with the visual probe task.
Why
The reliability of the visual probe task was poor, so the authors argue it should not be used for repeated testing or individual differences, and read the null as consistent with theories in which attentional bias is a state rather than a stable trait.
From the published paper: Bartlett et al. Journal of Trial and Error, 2022. ↗CC BY