Marriage as nukes (a fun analogy): Consider a man and a woman in a relationship. The man says “I love my freedom, but it hurts so much to see her with another man...” That is, suppose that the opportunity to cheat on the woman without too much consequence offers the man less utility than he loses when the woman cheats on him. Suppose the woman feels similarly. This is precisely a prisoner’s dilemma: self interest harms the “opponent” more than it benefits the player.
Solution: you each sacrifice a little utility to buy a marriage license which ensures sufficient punishment for infidelity to prevent either of you from doing it. You lose your freedom, but you gain the more valuable asset of partner’s fidelity. I.e., you buy nukes :)
(I once used this to argue against someone who said “Marriage is always pointless.”)
Memory formation and memory retrieval are very different tasks, so one should be specific when making claims like “Caffeine helps long term memory.” For example, if caffeine only hinders long term memory formation, but not retrieval, then this would suggest using it during an exam, but not while studying. If vice versa, then vice versa.
Unfortunately for our purposes, the authors of your first article have blurred this distinction in their abstract, no doubt because it was not the subject of their study: their method was to add caffeine to rats’ water supplies, without controlling the timing of the doses in relation to the events of formation and retrieval.
I was happy to find your last article addresses precisely this question:
Nice article, IMO. Its conclusion might suggest drinking caffeine right after study sessions (or in breaks between them, while ruminating on the ideas) is the best strategy. On the other hand, perhaps in the long term, the non-specific effects of the first study would dominate.
Personally, I’m definitely unconvinced by these data as to how I should be using caffeine, but as you can see you’ve got me very curious!