In The News This Week … July 17–23, 2004: A Peril of Caffeine

Researchers have attacked yet another of our favorite – and most innocent – vices: caffeine.

In a study entitled Caffeine, Priming, and Tip of the Tongue: Evidence for Plasticity in the Phonological System, published in Behavioral Neuroscience (June 2004, 18(3): 453-61), researchers Valerie E. Lesk and Stephen P. Womble discovered that a caffeinated beverage like coffee, while perking folk up in the morning, seems to shut down other areas of people's brains. It can sometimes make us forgetful!

According to their study, subjects who had ingested 200mg of caffeine had more difficulty recalling words they already knew. This situation is called the Tip of the Tongue phenomenon. After ingesting the caffeine (or placebo), subjects were asked a question and shown a list of 10 words that included the correct answer. When the extra words in the list were unrelated to the correct answer, "caffeinated" subjects had more difficulty recalling which word was correct. However – all is not lost – when some words phonologically related to the correct word, thus similar, caffeine helped performance. While this is not a realistic scenario, the closest to real would be the situation in which the subjects did poorly.

Alas ….

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