Ah, this was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to learn from the “Invitation to Measure Meditation” post. How do you know this—did you need to read a lot of papers, or is there a good survey paper that you could point to?
And do you have a recommendation for how to measure working memory or neuroticism? (It’s fine if you don’t.)
In the previous post, you suggested taking a Big-5 personality test. I’m allergic to those things, though. They’re so vague I don’t know what to do: should I answer how I believe I would behave right now, or how I want to behave right now, or how I think I’ve behaved in the past, or how I want to think of myself behaving, or how I want others to think of me behaving? If the answer is “sometimes very strongly yes, and sometimes very strongly no”, is that higher or lower then “always middling”? And I don’t think I could keep my beliefs of how meditation would effect my answers from effecting my answers. In short, I can’t imagine learning anything useful from a Big-5 personality test.
Working memory, however, sounds much easier to test.
neuroticism is from the big 5. Shrug. Working memory tests are available online in a variety of formats. I’d probably just pick the 2-3 that seemed good then retake them later. I did Ravens and the one with number of boxes. Showed slight improvement 6 months apart, within test retest variation though. To date there have been a couple studies that showed implausibly large effect size on working memory. Someone should really follow up on them with more funding.
I feel frustration when people don’t measure the two things that have shown the largest effect in studies to date: working memory and neuroticism.
Ah, this was exactly the sort of thing I was hoping to learn from the “Invitation to Measure Meditation” post. How do you know this—did you need to read a lot of papers, or is there a good survey paper that you could point to?
And do you have a recommendation for how to measure working memory or neuroticism? (It’s fine if you don’t.)
In the previous post, you suggested taking a Big-5 personality test. I’m allergic to those things, though. They’re so vague I don’t know what to do: should I answer how I believe I would behave right now, or how I want to behave right now, or how I think I’ve behaved in the past, or how I want to think of myself behaving, or how I want others to think of me behaving? If the answer is “sometimes very strongly yes, and sometimes very strongly no”, is that higher or lower then “always middling”? And I don’t think I could keep my beliefs of how meditation would effect my answers from effecting my answers. In short, I can’t imagine learning anything useful from a Big-5 personality test.
Working memory, however, sounds much easier to test.
neuroticism is from the big 5. Shrug. Working memory tests are available online in a variety of formats. I’d probably just pick the 2-3 that seemed good then retake them later. I did Ravens and the one with number of boxes. Showed slight improvement 6 months apart, within test retest variation though. To date there have been a couple studies that showed implausibly large effect size on working memory. Someone should really follow up on them with more funding.
I don’t know of a good survey paper.
Meditation increases working memory? Do you have a reference on that?
A better methodological study was done, which I hadn’t seen before, contra the two mentioned:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41465-018-0064-5
My guess would be the earlier studies ignored test familiarity effect, which affects some types of working memory tests.