Does Mindful Meditation Impact Short-Term Memory?

Abstract

This study examined the impact of mindful meditation on short-term memory recall in a controlled experiment with 24 participants aged 19 to 23 years. Participants were randomly assigned to a mindful meditation or non-meditation group and exposed to different YouTube videos. Despite our hypotheses, no significant differences were found between the meditation and non-meditation groups in either the correct or made-up word conditions; although a medium effect size was noted for the generation of made-up words. The results of this study suggest that further investigation is needed to clarify the effects of mindful meditation on memory recall. Limitations of the experiment include potential biases from participant selection and a possible boredom effect. Future research could explore alternative experimental protocols, adjusting for gender variance and considering shorter meditation sessions or longer intervention periods to better understand meditation's cognitive impacts.