A Single Session of Mindfulness Meditation Expedites Immediate Motor Memory Consolidation to Improve Wakeful Offline Learning

James O. Brown, Alex Chatburn, David L. Wright, Maarten A. Immink

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Posttraining meditation has been shown to promote wakeful memory stabilization of explicit motor sequence information in learners who are experienced meditators. We investigated the effect of single-session mindfulness meditation on wakeful and sleep-dependent forms of implicit motor memory consolidation in meditation naïve adults. Immediately after training with a target implicit motor sequence, participants (N = 20, eight females, 23.9 ± 3.3 years) completed either a 10-min mindfulness meditation (N = 10) or a control listening task before exposure to task interference induced by training with a novel implicit sequence. Target sequence performance was tested following 5-hr wakeful and 15-hr postsleep periods. Bayesian inference was applied to group comparisons of mean reaction time (RT) changes across training, interference, wakeful, and postsleep timepoints. Relative to control conditions, posttraining meditation reduced RT slowing between target sequence training and interference sequence introduction (BF10 [Bayes factors] = 6.61) and supported RT performance gains over the wakeful period (BF10 = 8.34). No group differences in postsleep RT performance were evident (BF10 = 0.38). These findings illustrate that posttraining mindfulness meditation expedites wakeful, but not sleep-dependent, offline learning with implicit motor sequences. Previous meditation experience is not required to obtain wakeful consolidation gains from posttraining mindfulness meditation.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)45-70
Number of pages26
JournalJournal of Motor Learning and Development
Volume11
Issue number1
Early online date13 Dec 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2023

Keywords

  • motor sequence learning
  • attention
  • implicit learning
  • serial reaction time task
  • Bayesian inference

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