Mindfulness Meditation May Not Increase False-Memory and May Instead Protect from False-Memory Susceptibility

Abstract

A recent study demonstrated that a single session of mindfulness meditation increased false memories using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. This purportedly resulted from mindfulness meditation inducing nonjudgmental observation of experience that contributed to failure to distinguish internally generated from externally presented information. We sought to replicate these results and extend them by warning half of the participants that the DRM task would elicit false memories. We hypothesized that we would see a lower incidence of false memories in the mindfulness induction–warning group consistent with previous findings regarding control of attention. In two experiments, we found results inconsistent with our hypotheses: in Experiment 1, the mindfulness induction did not lead to a greater number of false memories, nor did the warning interact with the induction; in Experiment 2, groups did not differ in the number of false memories, and the mindfulness meditation group significantly decreased false memories after the mindfulness induction. We propose that it may be too early to conclude that mindfulness meditation increases susceptibility to false memory.