REAL LIFE NEWS: SEE, I TOLD YOU COFFEE WAS GOOD FOR YOU!
by Hazed
Good news: coffee doesn’t just keep you awake, it also helps your memory.
Researchers from John Hopkins University have discovered that caffeine has a direct impact on long-term memory. Michael Yassa, the assistant professor of neurobiology and behaviour at the university, explained that they showed their test subjects “pictures on a computer screen and we asked them to make a simple decision whether these pictures were indoor pictures or outdoor pictures. It didn’t really matter what the picture was or what they said, we just wanted to get them engaged in a task and sort of encode these images.
“We wanted them to learn these images without actually telling them it is going to be a memory test afterwards.”
The researchers then gave the subjects a pill which either contained 200mg of caffeine or none at all (a placebo) and sent them away.
The next day the researchers made the subjects take a “surprise test”, in which they were asked to remember images from the first test. They were shown a variety of pictures, some of which were the same as the ones from the previous day, some were similar but not identical, and some were brand new images. More people who had been given the caffeine tablets were able to identify the new images as “similar” to previously viewed images, rather than saying they were the same, than the placebo group.
The difference between this study and previous ones, which have not shown caffeine to have any effect on memory, is that the pills were administered after the experiment rather than before. “Almost all prior studies administered caffeine before the study session, so if there is an enhancement, it’s not clear if it’s due to caffeine’s effects on attention, vigilance, focus, or other factors,” Yassa said. “By administering caffeine after the experiment, we rule out all of these effects and make sure that if there is an enhancement, it’s due to memory and nothing else.”
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/13/coffee_a_memory_enhancing_drug_say_boffins/
