Effect of Meditation on Brain Activity during an Attention Task: A Comparison Study of ASL and BOLD Task fMRI

Two months of focused attention meditation training in novice meditators altered brain activity during a visual oddball task. Using arterial spin labeling (ASL), activation increased in the middle cingulate and temporoparietal regions; more practice time was linked to decreased activation in the medial prefrontal and middle frontal regions. Using BOLD, more practice time was linked to increased activation in the inferior parietal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and precentral regions. The effect sizes for changes and their association with practice time were larger with ASL than with BOLD. The findings suggest that focused attention meditation may improve attention by modulating the default mode, dorsal attention, salience, and frontoparietal networks, and that ASL may be a sensitive tool for studying these effects.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Focused attention meditation (FAM) training has been shown to improve attention, but the neural basis of FAM on attention has not been thoroughly understood. Here, we aim to investigate the neural effect of a 2-month FAM training on novice meditators in a visual oddball task (a frequently adopted task to evaluate attention), evaluated with both ASL and BOLD fMRI. Using ASL, activation was increased in the middle cingulate (part of the salience network, SN) and temporoparietal (part of the frontoparietal network, FPN) regions; the FAM practice time was negatively associated with the longitudinal changes in activation in the medial prefrontal (part of the default mode network, DMN) and middle frontal (part of the FPN) regions. Using BOLD, the FAM practice time was positively associated with the longitudinal changes of activation in the inferior parietal (part of the dorsal attention network, DAN), dorsolateral prefrontal (part of the FPN), and precentral (part of the DAN) regions. The effect sizes for the activation changes and their association with practice time using ASL are significantly larger than those using BOLD. Our study suggests that FAM training may improve attention via modulation of the DMN, DAN, SN, and FPN, and ASL may be a sensitive tool to study the FAM effect on attention.