title: A single bout of meditation biases cognitive control but not attentional focusing: Evidence from the global-local task.
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.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Psychological Research, Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands. Electronic address: colzato@fsw.leidenuniv.nl.
authors.forename: Lorenza S
authors.initials: LS
authors.lastname: Colzato
authors.affiliation: Institute for Psychological Research, Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Pauline
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: van der Wel
authors.affiliation: Institute for Psychological Research, Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Roberta
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sellaro
authors.affiliation: Institute for Psychological Research, Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Bernhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hommel
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019122:Meditation / Q000523:psychology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Congruency effect; Focused attention meditation (FAM); Global precedence; Open monitoring meditation (OMM)