Caffeine restores engagement speed but not shooting precision following 22 h of active wakefulness.

Background: Current military missions occasionally require combat readiness of soldiers who might be experiencing a sustained period of activity without sleep. Strategies to overcome the debilitating effects of sleep deprivation include the ingestion of caffeine. Unknown is the efficacy of caffeine use on specific elements of target detection and marksmanship following a modest period of sustained wakefulness.

Methods: There were 20 subjects (mean +/- SD of 26.7 +/- 7.2 yr of age, 179 +/- 6 cm in height, and 84.5 +/- 10.8 kg in weight) who participated in double-blind caffeine and placebo trials where each trial involved a 24-h control period (with sleep) followed by 22 h of mixed mental and physical activity with no sleep. At the end of this period, subjects engaged in a 1-h rifle-shooting task. Subjects ingested 400, 100, and 100 mg of caffeine or placebo at 7.5, 3, and 0 h, respectively, prior to shooting. Measures of shooting performance included target engagement time (between target appearance and firing), friend-foe discrimination, accuracy, and precision.

Results: Most measures of performance were degraded in the placebo sleep-deprived condition, but only the target engagement time and the number of shots fired were restored by caffeine ingestion.

Conclusions: These findings concur with other research involving different periods of sleep deprivation, and indicate that the cognitive component of the shooting task (i.e., target detection) can benefit from caffeine whereas the psychomotor component (marksmanship) does not. It appears that once the target is detected, the subject is sufficiently aroused to engage the target regardless of the subject's level of alertness prior to detection.