Single-bout focused-attention meditation (FAM) and open-monitoring meditation (OMM) are assumed to bias metacontrol states towards more persistent versus more flexible processing, respectively. In Experiment 1, we tested whether monitoring and updating of WM representations in an N-Back task with high (3-back), medium (2-back), and low (1-back) WM demands (varied within participants) is affected by preceding single-bout FAM or OMM meditation (varied between participants and compared to a control group). Results showed that FAM promotes WM performance in the medium (2-back), but not in the high (3-back) or low (1-back) demand condition, while OMM did not affect WM performance. A replication of the 2-back condition only (Experiment 2) showed no meditation effect, but a replication of the 3-back condition only (Experiment 3) produced a similar pattern as the 2-back condition in Experiment 1, with FAM promoting performance as compared to OMM and the control condition. Taken altogether, these findings suggest that single-bout FAM does promote WM performance but only if the capacity demands are neither too high nor too low.

假设单次集中注意力冥想 (FAM) 和开放式监控冥想 (OMM) 分别使元控制状态偏向于更持久和更灵活的处理。在实验 1 中，我们测试了在具有高（3-back）、中（2-back）和低（1-back）WM 需求（参与者内部不同）的 N-Back 任务中监控和更新 WM 表示是否受到影响通过之前的单次 FAM 或 OMM 冥想（参与者之间有所不同并与对照组相比）。结果表明，FAM 在中（2-back）需求条件下促进 WM 性能，但在高（3-back）或低（1-back）需求条件下没有提升，而 OMM 不影响 WM 性能。仅复制 2-back 条件（实验 2）显示没有冥想效果，但仅复制 3-back 条件（实验 3）产生与实验 1 中的 2-back 条件类似的模式，与 OMM 和控制条件相比，FAM 提高了性能。总而言之，这些发现表明单次 FAM 确实促进了 WM 性能，但前提是容量需求既不太高也不太低。