Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Mindfulness meditation is a form of secular meditation thatemphasizes non-judgmental awareness of the presentmoment. Research into mindfulness has greatly expanded inrecent years (Davidson & Kasniak, 2015) and a growingliterature has documented effects of mindfulness training oncognition. However, the specific aspects of mindfulnessmeditation training for novice practitioners that mightinfluence cognition remain unexplored. The present studyused a rigorous, dual-blind design to investigate whether theattention-monitoring component of mindfulness meditationreduces mind-wandering and improves performance duringreading comprehension and sustained attention tasks. Whencompared with relaxation meditation, mindfulness trainingimproved recall of specific details from a text but did notreduce mind-wandering or affect sustained attention. Theresults are discussed with respect to design considerationswhen studying a meditation intervention.