Caffeine and Memory Consolidation

Paper

Borota et al. (2014) Post-study caffeine administration enhances memory consolidation in humans. Nature Neuroscience 17, 201–203.

Commentary

Stimulating Memory Consolidation. News and Views by Favila and Kuhl. Nature Neuroscience 17, 151-152.

Media

Our work has been covered by numerous media outlets. Click here to browse.

Caffeine is a psychostimulant with many known cognitive-enhancing effects such as increased alertness, arousal, enhanced attention and focus, and reduced distraction. We were curious if it also had an effect on long-term memory storage and forgetting. As avid coffee drinkers (collectively), we thought we would do this the most rigorous way we could. We borrowed a classical post-training design from animal literature pioneered by Jim McGaugh and conducted a study in humans where we identified an enhancing effect of caffeine on memory consolidation. The effect was specific to consolidation and not retrieval. The paper was published in Nature Neuroscience in January of 2014. Press releases were issued by Johns Hopkins and UC Irvine. See more on our media page. For questions about this work, contact the Principal Investigator. Access the paper here.