Differential effects of focused attention and open monitoring meditation on varied prospective memory tasks

Mindfulness meditation can help individuals consciously maintain their attention on present stimuli. This form of mental training incorporates both focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM) techniques. These distinct methods cultivate separate cognitive skills related to awareness, suggesting their impact on various categories of prospective remembering could differ significantly. This study recruited 108 participants and adopted a 4 (groups: FA group, OM group, control group, baseline group) × 3 (types: high-overlap, low-overlap, dual-stimuli) mixed experimental design to investigate whether FA and OM have different effects on different types of prospective memory. The results showed that FA primarily enhanced prospective memory performance under the low-overlap condition, whereas OM significantly facilitated prospective memory under both high-overlap and dual-stimuli conditions. The results indicated that there are variations in the enhancement of prospective memory between FA and OM. FA meditation primarily facilitates prospective memory under conditions of low processing overlap, whereas OM meditation shows stronger benefits in contexts characterized by high processing overlap and increased stimulus complexity.