Abstract
During meditation, practitioners are required to center their attention on a specific object for extended periods of time. When their thoughts get diverted, they learn to quickly disengage from the distracter. We hypothesized that learning to respond to the dual demand of engaging attention on specific objects and disengaging quickly from distracters enhances the efficiency by which meditation practitioners can allocate attention. We tested this hypothesis in a global-to-local task while measuring electroencephalographic activity from a group of eight highly trained Buddhist monks and nuns and a group of eight age and education matched controls with no previous meditation experience. Specifically, we investigated the effect of attentional training on the global precedence effect, i.e., faster detection of targets on a global than on a local level. We expected to find a reduced global precedence effect in meditation practitioners but not in controls, reflecting that meditators can more quickly disengage their attention from the dominant global level. Analysis of reaction times confirmed this prediction. To investigate the underlying changes in brain activity and their time course, we analyzed event-related potentials. Meditators showed an enhanced ability to select the respective target level, as reflected by enhanced processing of target level information. In contrast with control group, which showed a local target selection effect only in the P1 and a global target selection effect in the P3 component, meditators showed effects of local information processing in the P1, N2, and P3 and of global processing for the N1, N2, and P3. Thus, meditators seem to display enhanced depth of processing. In addition, meditation altered the uptake of information such that meditators selected target level information earlier in the processing sequence than controls. In a longitudinal experiment, we could replicate the behavioral effects, suggesting that meditation modulates attention already after a 4-day meditation retreat. Together, these results suggest that practicing meditation enhances the speed with which attention can be allocated and relocated, thus increasing the depth of information processing and reducing response latency.
Highlights
IntroductionThere is a limit to how quickly attention can be allocated and reallocated to a different object or parts of the same object (Hopf et al, 2006)
Attentional resources are limited and constrain the capacity to process information
We analyzed the mean amplitude of P1 (55–90 ms), N1 (130–190 ms), N2 (200–250 ms) and P3 (250–400 ms). We focused on those event-related potentials (ERPs) components as previous studies have related them to global/local processing (Han and Chen, 1996; Proverbio et al, 1998; Evans et al, 2000; Conci et al, 2011) and we aimed at investigating whether meditators and controls differed in ERPs known to reflect hierarchical stimulus processing
Summary
There is a limit to how quickly attention can be allocated and reallocated to a different object or parts of the same object (Hopf et al, 2006). This limitation becomes evident when considering that the visual world is intrinsically organized in a hierarchical manner. A forest has trees, and a tree in turn is composed of leaves. This example reflects the ubiquitous embedded relation between global and local parts present in the world. In psychophysical tests subjects are typically much faster in detecting the global pattern than the local detail; this phenomenon known as the “global precedence effect” (Navon, 1977) clearly illustrates the limitations in the speed of allocation of attention between the local and the global level
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