Caffeine, priming, and tip of the tongue: evidence for plasticity in the phonological system.

Valerie E Lesk, Stephen P Womble

Journal: Behavioral neuroscience 2004;118(3):453-61

PMID: 15174922

Full Text on American Psychological Association View on PubMed

Abstract

A study was performed involving phonological priming and tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) in which participants took either 200 mg of caffeine or placebo. Results show a clear positive priming effect produced for the caffeine group when primed with phonologically related words. When primed with unrelated words, the caffeine subgroup produced a significant increase in the number of TOTs. This contrasting effect provides evidence that the positive priming of caffeine was not a result of caffeine's well-known alertness effects. For placebo, a significant negative effect occurred with the related-word priming condition. The results support the novel hypothesis that the blocking of A, adenosine receptors by caffeine induces an increased short-term plasticity effect within the phonological retrieval system.

Address: Cognitive Neuroscience Sector, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, Via Beirut 2-4, 34014 Trieste, Italy. [email protected]

DOI: 10.1037/0735-7044.118.3.453

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MeSH Terms: Adult, Analysis of Variance, Caffeine, Central Nervous System Stimulants, Dose-Response Relationship, Drug, Double-Blind Method, Female, Humans, Male, Mental Recall, Phonetics, Psycholinguistics, Purinergic P1 Receptor Antagonists, Semantics, Verbal Behavior