Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
7288706 | Consciousness and Cognition | 2016 | 7 Pages |
Abstract
Recent studies show that a single bout of meditation can impact information processing. We were interested to see whether this impact extends to attentional focusing and the top-down control over irrelevant information. Healthy adults underwent brief single bouts 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 a global-local task. While the size of the global-precedence effect (reflecting attentional focusing) was unaffected by type of meditation, the congruency effect (indicating the failure to suppress task-irrelevant information) was considerably larger after OMM than after FAM. Our findings suggest that engaging in particular kinds of meditation creates particular cognitive-control states that bias the individual processing style toward either goal-persistence or cognitive flexibility.
Keywords
Related Topics
Life Sciences
Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience
Authors
Lorenza S. Colzato, Pauline van der Wel, Roberta Sellaro, Bernhard Hommel,