Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Candela Sofía León | Email: cleon@itba.edu.ar
Candela Sofia Leon1°2°, Agustina Lo Celso1°,Luis Brusco3°, Cecilia Forcato1°
1° Laboratorio de Sueño y Memoria, Dpto. de Cs. de la Vida, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
2° Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
3° Centro de Neuropsiquiatría y Neurología de la Conducta-CENECON, Facultad de Ciencias Médicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)
Numerous studies have observed a facilitating effect of caffeine on cognition, particularly in memory, consumed before learning with immediate testing. However, these studies do not appropriately distinguish whether this enhancing effect acts on encoding or the consolidation of these memories. One study evaluated the caffeine effect on the consolidation of object recognition memory and observed that this substance could improve the discrimination between previously seen and similar objects. In this work, we aim to study the caffeine effect on the consolidation of face recognition memory. To evaluate this, a randomized, double-blind study (N = 49) was conducted where 200 mg of caffeine/placebo was administered after encoding 10 human faces, each face displayed on the screen for 3 seconds and repeated in two trials. The following day, testing was conducted where participants were randomly assigned to either the present condition, where they observed 10 lineups of 6 faces each, one of which was the original, or the absent condition, where they observed 10 lineups of 6 faces each, none of which were the original face. No significant differences have been observed between the groups in any of the conditions. The lack of observed differences in our study may be due to the small sample size or because caffeine does not have an effect on the consolidation of this type of stimuli. However, it is necessary to increase the sample size to draw appropriate conclusions.