A Brief Mindfulness Exercise Before Retrieval Reduces Recognition Memory False Alarms

The impact of a 3-min state mindfulness exercise was investigated in recognition memory performance in order to test if memorial benefits would be found without long-term training. Four experiments (total N = 369) compared the effect of the exercise before encoding versus retrieval. False alarms decreased after a 3-min mindfulness exercise prior to retrieval whether the stimuli were words (experiment 1) or nonwords (experiment 2). When the mindfulness exercise occurred before encoding, there was no benefit on error rates (experiments 3 and 4). The results suggest that even a brief state mindfulness exercise can have immediate and positive effects on recognition memory performance. Implications for improving practical memory tasks such as test taking or eyewitness memory are discussed.