Short-term Focused Attention Meditation Restricts the Retrieval of Stimulus-Response Bindings to Relevant Information
Mindfulness March 9, 2021 Sarah Ullrich, Lorenza S. Colzato, Nicole Wolff et al. 10 citations
Fifteen minutes of focused attention (FA) meditation can restrict the retrieval of stimulus-response (S-R) bindings to relevant information, supporting the metacontrol state model (MSM) which proposes that meditation biases cognitive processes toward persistence. In a within-subject crossover design with novice meditators, a single bout of FA meditation decreased partial overlap costs in an event file task, but only when participants had prior experience with the task. The effect was short-lived, appearing only in the early phases of the task, indicating that in novices, short-term FA meditation produces fragile adjustments in processing strategy.