Meditation-induced states predict attentional control over time

• Meditation has an immediate impact on allocation of attention.
• Focused attention meditation (FAM) might increase top-down control.
• Open monitoring meditation (OMM) might weaken top-down control.
• Attentional Blink deficit was smaller after OMM than after FAM.
• Meditation instantly creates cognitive-control states that bias attention.

Meditation is becoming an increasingly popular topic for scientific research and various effects of extensive meditation practice (ranging from weeks to several years) on cognitive processes have been demonstrated. Here we show that extensive practice may not be necessary to achieve those effects. Healthy adult non-meditators underwent a brief single session of either focused attention meditation (FAM), which is assumed to increase top-down control, or open monitoring meditation (OMM), which is assumed to weaken top-down control, before performing an Attentional Blink (AB) task – which assesses the efficiency of allocating attention over time. The size of the AB was considerably smaller after OMM than after FAM, which suggests that engaging in meditation immediately creates a cognitive-control state that has a specific impact on how people allocate their attention over time.