CAFFEINE AND SHORT TERM MEMORY

Caffeine and Short Term Memory

Abstract

This report will be investigating the effect of caffeine on short term memory by choosing 15 subjects and conduct a short term memory test on them without caffeine. Then after supply those with 80mg of caffeine and conduct another short term memory test similar to the previous one. This report will also be able to present the record of their scores both times and check if there are any improvements with the intake of caffeine. The short term memory test consists of showing the subjects 7 numbers for a period of 5 seconds and then seeing how many they can recall.

Caffeine and Short Term Memory

Introduction

Caffeine is thought to act as a central stimulant and to have effects on cognitive functioning by enhancing alertness and vigilance (Goldstein and Kaizer, 1969; Lieberman et al., 1987). Although it has been reported that caffeine has no direct effects on memory functions (Loke, 1988), it was recently found that 250 mg of caffeine could attenuate scopolamine-induced memory dysfunction without increasing psychomotor speed (Riedel et al., 1995b). This is of interest for studies of cognitive aging, in view of the decrease in memory functioning with age and the development of cognition enhancers.

Rationale and Background of the Study

The present study evaluated the effects of caffeine on memory and memory-related processes in a cross-sectional study involving three age groups (young, middle-aged, and old). Effects of caffeine in middle-aged subjects are especially interesting because of known differences in habitual caffeine use between cohorts (Riedel et al., 1995a) and because cognitive performance has been found to be diminished in the fourth and fifth decades of life (Houx et al., 1991); Jolles et al., 1995a). Moreover, most studies generally compare young and old subjects. There have been relatively few studies of the effect of caffeine in ageing subjects. In a large population study of 7414 subjects, improved performance was associated with higher levels of caffeine consumption. Elderly subjects appeared more susceptible to the performance improving effects of caffeine on memory, visuospatial reasoning, and reaction time tasks (Jarvis, 1993). Yu et al. (1991) found that the performance of elderly subjects on a continuous attention test improved with caffeine relative to placebo. The elderly subjects also felt more alert, energetic, and interested with caffeine.

Another study (Swift and Tiplady, 1988) reported that young and old subjects responded differently to caffeine. The authors suggested that the beneficial effects of caffeine in elderly subjects were possibly due to central mechanisms, as reflected by a decrease in the number of errors on cognitive tasks. The beneficial effects were not mediated by an increase in psychomotor speed, as they were in the younger subjects. Lorist et al. (1995), however, did not find substantial differences between the effects of caffeine on cognitive functions in elderly and young subjects. They found that caffeine could only partly counteract the decreased energetical resources of elderly subjects during task performance, in that caffeine counteracted the age-related performance decrement related to perceptual ...