We sometimes need to perform specific actions at specific future times, such as remembering to take a medication an hour before dinner. Successfully completing these time-based prospective memory tasks requires keeping the task in mind while monitoring the passage of time. Because they require sustained attention and monitoring, these tasks place high demands on cognitive resources. Mindfulness training may improve the attentional allocation and monitoring capacities critical for successful task performance. 

Wang and Guo [Consciousness and Cognition] tested the effects of mindfulness training on time-based prospective memory under conditions in which participants could either check the time freely or were limited in how often they could do. They hypothesized that mindfulness training would increase task accuracy, especially when opportunities to check the time were limited.

The researchers assigned 95 Chinese undergraduate students (mean age = 22 years; 76% male) to either a mindfulness training group or a control group. Mindfulness participants listened to five 12-minute, breath-centered guided mindfulness meditation recordings over the course of one week. Control participants spent the same amount of time engaging in non-mindfulness related activities, such as reading.

Following the intervention, all participants completed two simultaneous laboratory tasks. One task involved letters presented on a computer screen; participants pressed computer keys to indicate whether a letter just seen was the same or different from a letter presented half a second earlier. Concurrently, participants were required to remember to press a separate computer key once every minute.

Half of the participants in each group could press a space bar whenever they liked to reveal how much time had elapsed since the start of the trial, whereas the other half were permitted to check elapsed time only once per trial. Time judgments were deemed accurate if key presses occurred within a window of 57 to 63 seconds.

Results showed that the mindfulness group was significantly more accurate in judging when one minute had elapsed compared to the control group (ηp2 = 0.05; a small-to-moderate effect size). Participants with unlimited opportunity to check the time were also more accurate than those with limited opportunity (ηp2 = 0.29; a large effect size).

Importantly, there was a significant interaction between the training conditions (mindfulness vs. control) and checking condition (ηp2 = 0.04). Specifically, the mindfulness group was more accurate than the control group only when time checking was limited (ηp2 = 0.20).

These findings suggest that mindfulness training may enhance time-based prospective memory performance when people cannot rely on external time cues and must instead depend on their internal sense of time passage.

However, the study has limited ecological validity because it examined prospective memory over a very short interval of one minute, whereas time-based prospective memory tasks often involve monitoring time over hours or days. Also, the authors did not explicitly report whether random assignment was applied.

Reference:

Wang, M., & Guo, Y. (2026). Mindfulness meditation can improve time-based prospective memory performance in restricted monitoring situation. Consciousness and Cognition. 

Link to study