Being Present for the Future: Exploring Mindfulness and Prospective Memory

While mindfulness research has become a trending topic in cognitive science, there is a gap in the literature that fails to address the possible relationship between mindfulness and prospective memory. To explore this relationship, students randomly assigned to either an app-based meditation condition or active control condition were asked to remember and complete 10 self-concordant academic tasks (both time-based and non-time-based) over the course of 5 days. Academic task completion (i.e., prospective remembering) was indexed by successful submission of pictures indicative of the intended-to-be-completed task at the appropriate, aforementioned time and/or day. Results from Bayesian models showed a high probability that time-based tasks were more difficult to complete than non-time-based tasks. Very brief app-based mindfulness meditation was more likely to increase completion of time-based tasks compared to non-time-based tasks; however, the increase in performance was likely to be very modest. Trait mindfulness measures illustrated a high likelihood that some features of mindfulness were positively associated with task completion, while other aspects were likely to be negatively related to performance. Importantly, the variance accounted for by any of the mindfulness traits was very likely to be small. Hence, it appears that brief app-based mindfulness training only modestly increases prospective remembering, with a higher likelihood for the more attentionally demanding tasks. Considering these findings, being present, in the moment, may not produce robust effects on remembering in the future, but students may reap the potential mental health benefits of meditation without compromising their ability to complete future tasks.