Meditation-induced cognitive-control states regulate working memory task performance

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 74, pp. 1465–1476

Abstract

Single-bout focused-attention meditation (FAM) and open-monitoring meditation (OMM) are assumed to bias metacontrol states towards more persistent versus more flexible processing, respectively. In Experiment 1, we tested whether monitoring and updating of working memory (WM) representations in an N-back task with high (3-back), medium (2-back), and low (1-back) WM demands (varied within participants) is affected by preceding single-bout FAM or OMM meditation (varied between participants and compared with a control group). The results showed that FAM promotes WM performance in the medium (2-back), but not in the high (3-back) or low (1-back) demand condition, whereas OMM did not affect WM performance. A replication of the 2-back condition only (Experiment 2) showed no meditation effect, but a replication of the 3-back condition only (Experiment 3) produced a similar pattern as the 2-back condition in Experiment 1, with FAM promoting performance compared with OMM and the control condition. Taken together, these findings suggest that the single-bout FAM does promote WM performance but only if the capacity demands are neither too high nor too low.

Authors 2

1. Ke Ma corresponding

   Southwest University

   Affiliation as printed

   Key Laboratory of Personality and Cognition, Faculty of Psychological Science, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

2. Bernhard Hommel corresponding Aachen Institute for Psychological Research & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition

   Leiden University · Shandong Normal University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

   Institute for Psychological Research & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands