Caffeine found to increase alertness and detection accuracy for moving targets That morning coffee might be even more helpful than you think. In the first study of its kind to explore caffeine's effects on dynamic visual skills, researchers concluded that caffeine increases alertness and detection accuracy for moving targets. Caffeine also improved participants' reaction times. "A lot of what happens in our environment is moving-like trying to cross a busy intersection as a pedestrian or finding something on a shelf as you're walking through the aisles of a grocery store," said Dr. Kristine Dalton of Waterloo's School of Optometry & Vision Science. "Testing visual acuity under dynamic conditions can provide more information about our functional performance in these scenarios than traditional static visual acuity measurements alone." Visual acuity, also known as clarity of vision or sharpness of vision, refers to a person's ability to detect and recognize small details and can be measured under static (stationary) or dynamic (moving) conditions. While both static and dynamic visual acuity provide important information about how we interact with the world around us, dynamic visual acuity skills are especially important in the many daily activities in which we, or objects around us are moving. "While we already know that caffeine increases the velocity of rapid-eye movements, we wanted to further investigate how exactly caffeine enhances visual processing and facilitates the detection of moving visual stimuli by testing dynamic visual acuity," said co-author Beatríz Redondo of the University of Granada's Department of Optics.
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