Is Napping Better Than a Cup of Caffeinated Coffee?

Overall, a daytime nap generally improved performance across three different learning paradigms, while caffeine impaired (or at least did not benefit) performance. We hypothesize that the pattern of results demonstrated by the caffeine group may be explained by the relative level of explicit information in each memory task. The three tasks, perceptual learning, procedural motor skill, and verbal memory, each have varying levels of explicit information involved in learning.