Mindfulness meditation can improve time-based prospective memory performance in restricted monitoring situation

The successful execution of time-based prospective memory (TBPM) tasks demands self-initiation attentional resources. Mindfulness meditation can enhance attention, which may promote TBPM performance. This study investigates whether mindfulness meditation can facilitate TBPM via the improvement of attentional resources and whether such facilitation is modulated by time-monitoring conditions. The experiment, conducted with 95 participants, used a 2 (group: mindfulness meditation group, control group) × 2 (monitoring condition: limited, sufficient) between-subjects design. All 95 participants in this study were undergraduate students who volunteered. The results showed that, in the restricted condition, the TBPM accuracy of the mindfulness meditation group was better than that of the control group, indicating that mindfulness meditation indeed improves TBPM performance, but the facilitation of TBPM by mindfulness meditation is particularly susceptible to the influence of time-monitoring conditions.