In healthy adults who consumed the amount of caffeine contained in a cup of coffee, fMRI showed increased activity in the brain's frontal lobe, where part of the working memory network is located, and in the anterior cingulum, the part of the brain that controls attention.

"Caffeine has a definite effect on the short-term memory and on short-term memory processes,"said lead investigator Dr. Florian Koppelstätter, a radiology fellow at Medical University Innsbruck in Austria.

He described his study as the first to demonstrate that oral caffeine consumption has a positive effect on working memory, or more specifically the kind of brain activity required to perform a task such as looking up a phone number and remembering it until it's dialed.

To assess the effect of caffeine on short-term memory performance, Koppelstätter and his colleagues had 15 volunteers undergo fMRI while completing a verbal memory task on back-to-back days. Twenty minutes before each task, these subjects were randomly assigned to receive either a clear, odourless drink containing 100 milligrams of caffeine or a clear, odourless drink containing no caffeine.

The verbal memory task involved showing volunteers a sequence of simple images and then asking if a particular image was the same as one shown two images earlier. The volunteers were instructed to respond as quickly as possible using the right index finger for "yes" and the left index finger for "no." On both days, the task was performed following a 12-hour period of no caffeine and a four-hour period of no nicotine.

While the fMRI data showed significant patterns of activation in the frontal lobe and anterior cingulum when subjects consumed caffeine, these same subjects only showed typical activation patterns of working memory while on the inactive drink.

With files from The Medical Post.

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