title: Age effects on attentional blink performance in meditation.
abstract: Here we explore whether mental training in the form of meditation can help to overcome age-related attentional decline. We compared performance on the attentional blink task between three populations: A group of long-term meditation practitioners within an older population, a control group of age-matched participants and a control group of young participants. Members of both control groups had never practiced meditation. Our results show that long-term meditation practice leads to a reduction of the attentional blink. Meditation practitioners taken from an older population showed a reduction in blink as compared to a control group taken from a younger population, whereas, the control group age-matched to the meditators' group revealed a blink that was comparatively larger and broader. Our results support the hypothesis that meditation practice can: (i) alter the efficiency with which attentional resources are distributed and (ii) help to overcome age-related attentional deficits in the temporal domain.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neurology Unit, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University & Brain Imaging Center, Schleusenweg 2-16, 60528 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. sara_vanleeuwen@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: van Leeuwen
authors.forename: Notger G
authors.initials: NG
authors.lastname: Müller
authors.forename: Lucia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Melloni
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D054518:Attentional Blink; D001364:Awareness; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019122:Meditation; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D011214:Practice, Psychological; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D012691:Serial Learning; D055815:Young Adult