It’s no secret that coffee prompts alertness—which is just one of the many reasons why Americans can’t get through their mornings without a cup of joe. But you might be surprised to find out that, according to a new study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, simply seeing something that reminds us of coffee can make us feel a burst of alertness, as well.
Sam Maglio, an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Department of Management at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and his colleagues analyzed four separate studies on the physiological effects of coffee and tea cues in both eastern and western cultures.
“People often encounter coffee-related cues, or think about coffee, without actually ingesting it,” Maglio said. “We wanted to see if there was an association between coffee and arousal such that if we simply exposed people to coffee-related cues, their physiological arousal would increase, as it would if they had actually drank coffee.”
As it turns out, it did.
The researchers discovered that people who are exposed to coffee-related cues apparently perceive time as shorter and think in more concrete, precise terms. They call this phenomenon “priming”—when being exposed to a reminder of something has a similar effect on the brain as that something. (It’s kind of like how seeing a
