Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Meditation aims to improve ones psychological capacities by encouraging a calm and focused mind. Studies have ob-served positive benefits of meditation on health and cognition, such as reduced anxiety and enhanced executive control.Meditation has even been shown to alter brain structure and function. These benefits are mainly observed in long-termmeditators, with few studies examining the effects of short-term meditation. The current study investigated whether thereare immediate benefits of meditation. Electroencephalography was recorded while cognitive tasks were completed, wealso collected subjective well-being measures before and after exposure to either a brief meditation or a relaxation story.Post-intervention reaction time was shorter in meditators compared to the relaxation story. Both groups exhibited increasedwell-being, smaller N2s, and larger P3bs post-intervention. These results suggest that while mindfulness meditation mayimprove conflict monitoring, both interventions appear to improve well-being. Overall, there may be immediate benefitsof meditation for even novice meditators.