Regular caffeine consumption may not be much useful for sleep deprivation, a new study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition has unveiled.
The study included 275 participants, all of which were assessed after a night of sleep deprivation.
The participants were administered caffeine to counteract the effects on cognition caused by sleep deprivation.
From the findings: “Caffeine counteracted this impairment in vigilant attention but did not significantly affect placekeeping for most participants, though it did reduce the number of sleep-deprived participants who failed to maintain criterion accuracy.”
“These results suggest that sleep deprivation impairs placekeeping directly through a causal pathway that does not include visual vigilant attention, a finding that has implications for intervention research and suggests that caffeine has limited potential to reduce procedural error rates in occupational settings.”
