Caffeine, mainly found and consumed in the form of coffee, is the most widely used and accepted psychoactive drug worldwide (Yuan et al. 2020). For most students, especially ones in university, coffee and the caffeine it contains could become like your best-friend as you work through what could feel like an endless array of classes, tests, papers, exams, etc. Though while drinking coffee is associated with health benefits such as less risk for Alzheimer’s disease, decreased death from inflammatory diseases, and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, these are not the benefits that most coffee drinkers are thinking about when they buy or make their coffee(s). Since coffee increases the brains activity levels, acting as a stimulant, the effects and/or benefits that most people associate with its consumption are a sense of heightened alertness, leading also to improved attention. For most people they believe, some for reasons they are unsure of, that drinking coffee is the best or perhaps even the only way that they can properly focus and stay on tract with their work. This study researches the idea of coffee/caffeine as being a safe, effective, and accessible tool for people to use to enhance their cognitive functioning.

Yuan et al. (2020) did a study to try and determine the effect that caffeine has on cognitive function, primarily on pre-frontal cortex regions. They decided to focus on the pre-frontal cortex regions of the brain because it is these regions that are responsible for things such as focusing attention, setting or achieving goals/tasks, and planning and executing complex motor functions. To do this they selected 31 (15 male, 16 female) right-handed participants to undergo three trials of the Stroop task, which measures reaction time and reaction accuracy to congruent, incongruent, and neutral stimuli. The trials of the Stroop task involve pressing the corresponding key that matches the color of the word in-front of you on a screen. To get images and to measure the brains activity during the task trials the researchers used a technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is the least invasive neuroimaging technique out of the modern ones used today. All participants were screened prior to the study to make sure they had normal vision and color-vision, and no prior history of neurological or psychological illnesses.

The results of the experiment showed that coffee did have a significant effect on pre-frontal cortex activity during the execution of the Stroop task trials, thus increasing the participants accuracy and performance. Specifically, modulated activity in the ventrolateral pre-frontal cortex, which is associated with goal-appropriate response selection, was shown in response to coffee. Other modulated brain activity in the pre-frontal cortex was associated with different levels of coffee intake. Coffee was shown to increase performance on the more complex incongruent trials compared to the simpler congruent and neutral trials. Coffee effects did also produce a significant difference between the two genders, with males showing a stronger effect on behavioral performance in response to coffee, proving they are more sensitive to the effects of caffeine than the female group. Interestingly, the group that did not receive coffee had an overall faster average reaction time on all three different trials, which would usually be thought to be a characteristic of the caffeine group. Though while their reaction time was faster on average, their accuracy was lower on all three trials compared to the group that received the coffee. Overall, these results are significant in that it proves coffee can be a safe and accessible tool to enhance peoples daily cognitive functioning, and it also proves that all us students aren’t wrong when we overload on coffees when trying to get our work done.

Reference

• Yuan, Chen, Li, Ren (2020). Caffeine Effect on Cognitive Function during a Stroop Task: fNIRS Study. Hindawi; Neural Plasticity. Volume 2020, 8 pages.