Забудьте то, что выучили: влияние медитации на намеренное забывание

Психологический журнал. 2022. Т. 43. № 6. С. 28–42.

Сергеюк А. А., Sherbakova O.

One of the essential aspects of memory efficiency is the lack of recall (forgetting) of erroneous, traumatic,
or unimportant information. Therefore, the development of tools for control and facilitation of forgetting
is of particular importance. This work aims to investigate the impact of systematic mental training (openmonitoring
meditation) on the magnitude of intentional forgetting effect. 106 volunteers (69 women, 18–
35 years old) participated in our experiment. First, we measured 1) the intentional forgetting effect (using the
think/not-thinking paradigm followed by a questionnaire on preferred intentional forgetting strategies) and
2) the Stroop effect (using the classic Stroop test). Second, participants either completed a course of 30 openmonitoring
meditations (experimental group) or 30 sham meditations (control group 1), or were not subject
to any intervention at all (control group 2). Finally, we performed the same measures as we did at the first stage
of the study in order to register the effect of open-monitoring meditation on inhibition mechanisms that are
presumably involved in the manifestation of intentional forgetting effect. We found no statistically significant
influence of the intervention type neither on intentional forgetting effect nor Stroop effect. Although, it was
shown that after the intervention, in the meditation group, cognitive strategies preventing intentional forgetting
were used much less frequently than in the pseudomeditation (p = 0.009) and control (p = 0.007) groups,
and forgetting-facilitating strategies were used more often than before the intervention (p = 0.013). These results
indicate the need for further investigation of the amnesogenic potential of various mental training types;
also, they provide some indirect support for our initial suggestion about the impact of open-monitoring meditation
on the magnitude of intentional forgetting effect.

Keywords: память, memory, meditation, медитация, metamemory, метапамять, mental training, тест Струпа, intentional forgetting, open monitoring, think/ no-think paradigm, Stroop test, намеренное забывание, ментальная тренировка, метод “думать/не думать”