Abstract
Previous studies have examined the influence of meditation on three functionally different components of attention: executive control, alerting, and orienting. These studies have consistently found that meditation training improves both executive attention and alerting, but there has not been a consistent and clear effect of meditation training on orienting. In addition, while previous studies have shown that the functional coupling of the alerting and executive networks increases the processing of task irrelevant stimuli, it is unknown if participating in a meditation retreat can decouple these components of attention and lead to improved performance. The current study investigated the influence of a week-long intensive meditation retreat on three components of attention by randomly assigning participants to either pre- or postretreat testing groups. A modified attention network test (ANT) was used. Executive attention was measured as the difference in response time (RT) between congruent and incongruent task irrelevant flankers (conflict effect). Reflexive and volitional orienting were measured by manipulating cue validity and stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). The coupling of executive attention and alerting was measured by examining flanker interference as a function of the SOA of an alerting cue. The meditation retreat improved task based indices of executive attention, but not reflexive or volitional orienting. There was clear behavioral evidence of coupling between executive attention and alerting in the preretreat group, as the conflict effect peaked when an alerting cue was presented 300 ms before the target. Importantly, there was no increase in the conflict effect for the postretreat group. This is consistent with the notion that the retreat decoupled the executive and alerting networks. These results suggest that previously reported improvements in the executive and alerting networks after meditation training might be mediated by the same underlying mechanism.
Highlights
Identifying effective strategies for improving attention could have drastic impacts on everyday life: from saving lives by preventing car accidents to attenuating cognitive decline associated with aging
Since the goal of shamatha meditation is to develop sustained attention, and since a meditator must monitor the quality of attention and reorient attention when the mind has wandered, it seems reasonable to surmise that meditation could influence each of the three functions of attention
One participant omitted a response for the daily meditation practice question and a second participant omitted a response for the question concerning the number of days spent in retreat during the last 10 years
Summary
Identifying effective strategies for improving attention could have drastic impacts on everyday life: from saving lives by preventing car accidents to attenuating cognitive decline associated with aging. Studies have reported encouraging evidence suggesting that meditation activates multiple attention-related neural networks and improves the functioning of executive attention (Brefczynski-Lewis et al, 2007; Jha et al, 2007; Tang et al, 2007; Kozasa et al, 2011), vigilance/alerting (Jha et al, 2007; MacLean et al, 2010), and visuospatial processing (Kozhevnikov et al, 2009) These studies, and others in the literature, have used a variety of different meditation techniques. This suggests that meditators were quicker to reorient attention to an invalidly cued target In contrast to these conflicting results, neither Tang et al (2007) nor Baijal et al (2011) observed any influence of meditation training on the orienting efficiency score measured by the ANT. The overall influence of meditation on the orienting network is inconsistent and unclear
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