Meditation refers to a family of self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control and thereby foster general mental well-being and development and specific capacities such as calm, clarity, and concentration. Previous studies showed that meditation experts have greater improvement in concentration and attentional distribution after meditation retreat
The attentional blink (AB) is a transient attention cost that reflects the attentional distribution. It is regarded as one of the three bottlenecks in the information processing. Previous studies showed that meditation experts had better attention skills and showed improvement in the attentional blink. However, evidence from longitudinal study for the benefits of short-term meditation training remains scarce. Here we present a series of studies to explore potential effecets and underlying mechanism in short-teem meditation training on an attentional blink task.
On study 1，participants were randomized in meditation group or waiting-list group. They were receiving an eight-week meditation training and just-waiting period, respectively. Results showed that participants in the meditation group increased the meditation level, improved the degree of inner peace, and performed better in the AB task.
On study 2, a 4-week intermittent meditation training program and a 4-day consecutive meditation training program were presented in experiment 1 and experiment 2, respectively. Results showed that although the former meditation training program could increased the meditation level and imporved the degree of inner peace, it performed worse in the AB task compared to the control group. By contrast, the latter meditation training program showed the effectiveness of 4-day short-term meditation trainiong on AB task, and overperformed than the game training control group and the waiting-list control group. The effects were mainly showed in the female participants
On study 3, we explore the modulation of meditation on attention blink and its underlying mechanisms using event}related brain potential (ERP). Results showed that meditation training; reduced brain-resource allocation to the first target in non-blinked trials, as reflected by a smaller TI-elicited P3b, a brain-potential index of resource allocation.
Overall, these studies provided evidence to: (1) confirm the feasibility of short-term meditation training on attentional blink, (2) make comparison and optimization of different types of short-term meditation training programs, and to show that the effects of 4-day consective meditation program on AB was better than that of 4-week intermitted meditation program; (3) show the gender differences in the effect of meditation training, which is prior to females; (4) explore the mechanism of short-term meditation training on attention blink. All these make it possible to overcome the bottleneck in information processing through meditation training.
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