Talk:Effect of caffeine on memory

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 February 2020 and 2 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): GMSmith30. Peer reviewers: Jnasco.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:16, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Appropriate Style?
A banner on the main article says "This article is written like a personal reflection or opinion essay rather than an encyclopedic description of the subject."

I disagree. It contains no personal reflection and only a little bit of opinion. It contains a summary of research done on the effects of caffeine on learning and memory. It does read like a school assignment. I think the opinion should be removed and the writing quality improved but to call it a personal reflection or opinion essay is no help.187.45.181.168 (talk) 20:59, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I found this topic very interesting, but needing much further study to examine the link between memory and caffeine. My reason for offering an anecdotal incident is to link my experience with any researcher that might be exploring the topic. My wife, a very healthy and active 59 year female participated in a research experiment two weeks ago in the University of Michigan biology department. Two groups of women were asked to perform aerobic exercises after consuming coffee. All women were given two cups of coffee, one group with caffeine and one group without caffeine. She had an adverse reaction immediately after consuming two cups of caffeinated coffee and short spin on an Exercycle. Immediately after getting off the exercise machine she had a sudden onset of Transient Global Amnesia (TGA). The episode lasted eight hours. After eight hours of short term memory of about 20 seconds, her symptoms resolved over about 20 minutes. During the episode she was in a hospital emergency room, a CT, MRI, blood work, and ultrasound were all negative. We are awaiting an EEG test and neurologist exam. From what I have read about TGA, it is not likely to reoccur. The only diagnosis was TGA, which is sometimes preceded on by extreme exercise. I cannot help but wonder if the caffeine+exercise was related to the episode. Please feel free to contact me if there are other incidents with a similar scenario. I believe there is a causal relationship between exercise, caffeine, and TGA.

Steve Williams mibracedude@gmail.com

State Dependent Memory
I think adding a section to this article about the effects of state dependent memory is necessary. Research shows that when subjects are asked to recall information that they encoded while caffeine was in their systems did better on the test than subjects who encoded memories with caffeine and were asked to recall them without caffeine in their systems.

Suggestions
I think the introduction might benefit from incorporating some general discussion of the findings that go into better detail later on in the article. There are still citations missing in the Short-term memory and Age differences sections. It might be easier to keep up with what information citations are attributed to if they followed the last bit of information from that source. For example, if the details of a study and its results are being discussed, it would be easier for the reader to understand what the reference covers if it comes at the end of the discussion of that study, rather than the beginning or the middle. SofiaM80 (talk) 03:40, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Edits made by GMSmith30
I think the addition of a study that focused on state dependent memory and found that subjects who were in subjected to the same state before and after performed better on memory tests than those who were in different states was an extremely valuable addition to this Wikipedia page. I do think that a sentence should be added to that paragraph to tie it in with caffeine on memory (e.g., "Based on this study, it can be assumed that individuals who have consumed caffeine prior to encoding will do better when recalling information if they are also in a caffeine state during the test.")

I also thought that the paragraph added about the difference in caffeine affects on memory for females v. males was also a valuable addition. Great edits! Jnasco (talk) 17:55, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Addressing "too technical" flag in §1.2
I have made a substantial edit attempting to make this section more understandable. I tried to limit myself to matters of style, changing passive to active voice and being more to the point and less verbose. But in reviewing the citations I found the original was somewhat inaccurate with regard to drawing conclusions from the research cited, so I added some details and removed some unwarranted conclusions. I hope this helps, but feel free to revert if you don't like the result. I don't know if it is still "too technical", but I believe it is more readable. 100.19.20.76 (talk) 19:43, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Human Cognition SP23
— Assignment last updated by Silvadiane20 (talk) 23:57, 8 April 2023 (UTC)