Caffeine Effects on ERP Components and Performance in an Equiprobable Auditory Go/NoGo Task.

Research has reliably demonstrated that caffeine produces a general increase in physiological arousal in humans, but we previously failed to obtain the expected arousal-based changes in manually quantified event-related potential (ERP) components in response to the stimuli in a simple Go/NoGo task. A single oral dose of caffeine (250 mg) was used in a randomized double-blind placebo-controlled repeated-measures cross-over study. Adult participants (=24) abstained from caffeine for 4 hours before each of two sessions, approximately 1 week apart. An equiprobable auditory Go/NoGo task was used, with a random mix of 75 tones at 1,000 Hz and 75 at 1,500 Hz. All tones were 50 ms duration (rise/fall time 5 ms) at 60 dB SPL, with a fixed stimulus-onset asynchrony of 1100 ms. Principal component analysis (a form of factor analysis) was used to quantify orthogonal ERP components. ERP components reflected the different sequential processing of each stimulus type in this paradigm, replicating previous results. Caffeine was associated with a reduction in reaction time and fewer omission errors. The major ERP effects of caffeine were apparent as a slightly enhanced Processing Negativity and larger P3b amplitudes to Go stimuli. There were few effects on components to NoGo stimuli. The results confirm our previous findings that caffeine improves aspects of the differential processing related to response production and task performance, but may be interpreted as supporting the simple amplification of ERP component amplitudes predicted by the general arousal induced by caffeine.