Is it faster to access final local variables than class variables in Java?

I've been looking at at some of the java primitive collections (trove, fastutil, hppc) and I've noticed a pattern that class variables are sometimes declared as final local variables. For example:

public void forEach(IntIntProcedure p) {
    final boolean[] used = this.used;
    final int[] key = this.key;
    final int[] value = this.value;
    for (int i = 0; i < used.length; i++) {
        if (used[i]) {
          p.apply(key[i],value[i]);
        }
    }
}

I've done some benchmarking, and it appears that it is slightly faster when doing this, but why is this the case? I'm trying to understand what Java would do differently if the first three lines of the function were commented out.

Note: This seems similiar to this question, but that was for c++ and doesn't address why they are declared final.