Mind‑body practices, such as meditation and yoga, involve paying attention to breathing sensations. During these practices, individuals report "interoceptive lapses," moments when attention drifts away from internal bodily sensations. While lapses in attention to the external world have been widely studied, little is known about the physiological and neural mechanisms of interoceptive lapses....
Substantial evidence suggests that the late positive potential (LPP) indexes motivated attention to salient stimuli. However, traditional measurement of the LPP via mean amplitude may not fully capture rapid attentional dynamics. A nascent line of work has sought to remediate this limitation by measuring the LPP slope (i.e., rate of amplitude change); yet its functional significance and...
Individuals vary substantially in their responses to rewarding events and their motivation to pursue rewards. While the ventral striatum (VS) plays a central role in reward anticipation, its functional connectivity with the default mode network (DMN)-critical for self-referential processing and value integration-potentially represents a key mechanism through which trait differences manifest in...
The neural foundations of the Dark Triad (DT) personality traits-narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy-remain largely unexplored despite their profound impact on social behavior. Previous research has indicated potential structural and functional alterations in the default mode network (DMN) and reward-related regions in individuals exhibiting high levels of DT traits. However, these...
The ability to attend to and consciously process interoceptive signals is deemed critical for the development of minimal self, adaptive self-regulation and affective experience, and optimal expression of both instrumental and executive cognitive functions. Yet, notwithstanding the richness of theoretical proposals concerning inferential accounts of interoception, empirical evidence is still...
Over the past two decades, scientific interest in understanding the relationship between mindfulness and cognition has accelerated. However, despite considerable investigative efforts, pervasive methodological inconsistencies within the literature preclude a thorough understanding of whether or how mindfulness influences core cognitive functions. The purpose of the current study is to provide...
Mindfulness can produce neuroplastic changes that support adaptive cognitive and emotional functioning. Recently interest in single-exercise mindfulness instruction has grown considerably because of the advent of mobile health technology. Accordingly, the current study sought to extend neural models of mindfulness by investigating transient states of mindfulness during single-dose exposure to...
Humans have conscious experiences of the events in their environment. Previous research from electroencephalography (EEG) has shown visual awareness negativity (VAN) at about 200 ms to be a neural correlate of consciousness (NCC). However, when considering VAN as an NCC, it is important to explore which particular experiences are associated with VAN. Recent research proposes that VAN is an NCC...
Extracting statistical regularities from the environment is crucial for survival. It allows us to learn cues for where and when future events will occur. Can we learn these associations even when the cues are not consciously perceived? Can these unconscious processes integrate information over long periods of time? We show that human visual system can track the probability of location...
Cognitive theories of depression, and mindfulness theories of well-being, converge on the notion that self-judgment plays a critical role in mental health. However, these theories have rarely been tested via tasks and computational modeling analyses that can disentangle the information processes operative in self-judgments. We applied a drift-diffusion computational model to the...
Mindfulness training (MT) promotes the development of one's ability to observe and attend to internal and external experiences with objectivity and nonjudgment with evidence to improve psychological well-being. Real-time functional MRI neurofeedback (rtfMRI-nf) is a noninvasive method of modulating activity of a brain region or circuit. The posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) has been hypothesized...
Contemplative practices are thought to modify one's experience of self and fundamentally change self-referential processing. However, few studies have examined the brain correlates of self-referential processing in long-term meditators. Here, we used the self-referential encoding task (SRET) to examine event-related potentials (ERP) during assessment of pleasant and unpleasant self-views in...
Focused attention meditation (FAM) practices are cognitive control exercises where meditators learn to maintain focus and attention in the face of distracting stimuli. Previous studies have shown that FAM is both activating and causing plastic changes to the mesolimbic dopamine system and some of its target structures, particularly the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and striatum....
Psychopathy is a personality disorder accompanied by abnormalities in emotional processing and attention. Recent theoretical applications of network-based models of cognition have been used to explain the diverse range of abnormalities apparent in psychopathy. Still, the physiological basis for these abnormalities is not well understood. A significant body of work has examined...
Electrophysiological recordings are commonly used to study the neural correlates of consciousness in humans. Previous research is inconsistent as to whether awareness can be indexed with visual awareness negativity (VAN) at about 200 ms or if it occurs later. The present study was preregistered with two main aims: First, to provide independent evidence for or against the presence of VAN, and...
A sizeable body of literature demonstrates positive effects of mindfulness training on brain, behavior, and psychological processes in both novice and expert practitioners as compared to non-meditators. However, only more recently has research begun to examine the specific mechanisms by which mindfulness exerts these effects. In the current study, we used event-related potentials (error-related...
Up to 50% of individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) do not recover after two antidepressant medication trials, and therefore meet the criteria for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is one promising treatment; however, the extent to which MBCT influences clinical outcomes relative to baseline neural activation remains unknown. In the...
Previous studies found that word meaning can be processed unconsciously. Yet it remains unknown whether temporally segregated words can be integrated into a holistic meaningful phrase without consciousness. The first four experiments were designed to examine this by sequentially presenting the first three words of Chinese four-word idioms as prime to one eye and dynamic Mondrians to the other...
By a systematic analysis of the current literature on the neural correlates of mind wandering, that is, the default network (DN), and by shedding light on some determinative factors and conditions which affect the relationship between mind wandering and negative mood, we show that (1) mind wandering per se does not necessarily have a positive correlation with negative mood and, on the higher...
Mindfulness has been associated with enhanced performance monitoring; however, little is known about the processes driving this apparent neurocognitive benefit. Here, we tested whether focusing present-moment awareness toward the nonjudgmental experience of emotion facilitates rapid neural responses to negative performance outcomes (i.e., mistakes). In particular, we compared whether directing...
Mindfulness training is increasingly being introduced in schools, yet studies examining its impact on the developing brain have been scarce. A neurodevelopmental perspective on mindfulness has been advocated as a powerful tool to enhance our understanding of underlying neurocognitive changes that have implications for developmental well-being research and the implementation of mindfulness in...
Meditation has been associated with relatively reduced activity in the default mode network, a brain network implicated in self-related thinking and mind wandering. However, previous imaging studies have typically compared meditation to rest, despite other studies having reported differences in brain activation patterns between meditators and controls at rest. Moreover, rest is associated with...
We investigated whether mindfulness training (MT) influences information processing in a working memory task with complex visual stimuli. Participants were tested before (T1) and after (T2) participation in an intensive one-month MT retreat, and their performance was compared with that of an age- and education-matched control group. Accuracy did not differ across groups at either time point....
Mindfulness is defined as paying attention in the present moment. We investigate the hypothesis that mindfulness training may alter or enhance specific aspects of attention. We examined three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct but overlapping attentional subsystems: alerting, orienting, and conflict monitoring. Functioning of each subsystem was indexed by performance on the Attention...