Abstract
Sustained attention is a fundamental ability ensuring effective cognitive processing and can be enhanced by meditation practice. However, keeping a focused meditative state is challenging for novices because involuntary mind-wandering frequently occurs during their practice. Inspired by the potential of force-control tasks in invoking internal somatic attention, we proposed a haptics-assisted meditation (HAM) to help reduce mind-wandering and enhance attention. During HAM, participants were instructed to maintain awareness on the respiration and meanwhile adjust bimanual fingertip pressures to keep synchronized with the respiration. This paradigm required somatosensory attention as a physiological foundation, aiming to help novices meditate starting with the body and gradually gain essential meditation skills. A cross-sectional study on 12 novices indicated that the participants reported less mind-wandering during HAM compared with the classic breath-counting meditation (BCM). In a further longitudinal study, the experimental group with 10 novices showed significantly improved performance in several attentional tests after 5 days’ practice of HAM. They tended to show more significant improvements in a few tests than did the control group performing the 5-day BCM practice. To investigate the brain activities related to HAM, we applied functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to record cerebral hemodynamic responses from the prefrontal and sensorimotor cortices when performing HAM, and we assessed the changes in cerebral activation and functional connectivity (FC) after the 5-day HAM practice. The prefrontal and sensorimotor regions demonstrated a uniform activation when performing HAM, and there was a significant increase in the right prefrontal activation after the practice. We also observed significant changes in the FC between the brain regions related to the attention networks. These behavioral and neural findings together provided preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of HAM on attention enhancement in the early stage of meditation learning.
Highlights
Maintaining attention on a current undertaking and resisting the occurrence of unrelated thoughts are vital aspects of human behaviors
Hemodynamic Changes After Haptics-Assisted Meditation Training Mean concentrations of oxy-Hb and deoxy-Hb when performing attention network task (ANT) and sustained attention to response task (SART) in the posttests compared with the pretests by paired t-tests with false discovery rate (FDR) thresholding
Data from oxy-Hb showed a significant increase in the post-ANT in several channels over the prefrontal cortex (PFC), as well as in the left sensorimotor cortex (SMC) and the right SMC when compared with the pre-ANT
Summary
Maintaining attention on a current undertaking and resisting the occurrence of unrelated thoughts are vital aspects of human behaviors. Considerable literature has indicated the broad benefits of intensive meditation practice on attentional performance, mainly including better control over the distribution of limited attentional resources (Van Leeuwen et al, 2009; Slagter et al, 2011), improvement in executive control (Tang et al, 2007; Van den Hurk et al, 2018), and reduced mind-wandering (Mrazek et al, 2013). These findings provide evidence for the claim that meditation benefits the cognitive process, the features of conflict monitoring and attention control (Lutz et al, 2008; Malinowski, 2013; Posner et al, 2015; Tang et al, 2015). Practitioners’ attentional states are evaluated solely by themselves, and this limits the ability of meditation coaches to provide a timely reminder when the practitioners’ attention shifts away from their breathing
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