Mindfulness and false memories: state and dispositional mindfulness does not increase false memories for naturalistic scenes presented in a virtual environment

Julia Ayache,Marco Sperduti,Pascale Piolino,Kouloud Abichou,Valentina La Corte

doi:10.1007/s00426-021-01504-7

Abstract

Mindfulness attracted increased research interests in the last decade, reporting an overall beneficial effect of this practice on cognitive performances. Nevertheless, recently a possible detrimental impact of mindfulness has been underlined. While the effect of mindfulness on memory remains under-explored, recent studies have observed an increased false-memory susceptibility after mindfulness practice. A possible explanatory mechanism has been suggested, related to the nature of the studied material. For semantically related information, mindfulness would increase false memories; however, the addition of rich perceptual information could prevent this detrimental effect. The present study aimed to verify this hypothesis by testing the impact of state mindfulness induced by a short meditation session, and dispositional mindfulness on the production of false memory for pictorial material presented in a complex virtual environment. We employed a virtual reality version of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm (DRM), a classical protocol to induce false memories. Contrary to previous studies, we did not observe any effect of mindfulness on false or correct memories (free recall and recognition) after a short mindfulness practice session compared to a control condition. Nonetheless, we found a beneficial effect of mindfulness practice on memory sensitivity. Additionally, we reported a positive and negative effect of dispositional mindfulness on memory outcomes. While the Non-Reactivity facet was associated with overall better memory performances, we observed an association between the Acting with Awareness facet and an increased recollection of lures. We discuss these findings in line with a recent proposal on the link between mindfulness and episodic memory.

Highlights

Since its introduction in medical practice by the pioneering work of Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness has received increasing attention from the scientific community
The level of sleepiness was higher for the mindfulness induction (64.10 ± 21.71), with t(42) = 3.30, p < 0.01, 95% CI [9.15; 37.92] than for the story induction (40.56 ± 25.39)
We found that the facet Acting with Awareness positively predicted the recollection score for the false recognition with b = 0.02, p = 0.03, η2 < 0.01, with the global model being significant F(1; 42) = 5.07, p = 0.03 and adjusted R2 = 0.09

Summary

Introduction

Since its introduction in medical practice by the pioneering work of Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness has received increasing attention from the scientific community. 4), mindfulness is a specific mental state, cultivated by the practice of meditation and considered as a personality-like trait beyond any meditation training (Baer et al, 2006). Several cognitive models have described mindfulness principally as an attentional control training (Lutz et al, 2008; Tang et al, 2015). A wide range of studies have pointed out the effect of short- and long-term practice. Given the established link between attention and memory (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin et al, 2000; Sperduti et al, 2017a), one should expect a beneficial effect of such practice on memory processes. The effect of mindfulness meditation on memory has received little attention until recently

Results

Discussion

Conclusion