The Mindfulness Internal Attention (MIA) Framework: Looking In to Understand Attentional Mechanisms of Mindfulness Training

Decades of research on how mindfulness training affects attention have produced mixed results. To explain these findings, the Mindfulness Internal Attention (MIA) framework proposes that mindfulness primarily trains internal attention—processes focused on internally generated experiences like bodily sensations and thoughts. These internal attentional skills then generalize to late-stage external processes that handle abstracted information, such as inhibitory control and working memory updating. However, mindfulness training is unlikely to affect early-stage external processes that handle raw sensory input, like alerting or orienting to visual stimuli. Internal attention is proposed as essential for key mindfulness benefits like decentering and acceptance. A critical review of empirical findings supports this framework.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Although attention is thought to have a definitive role in mindfulness and its salutary outcomes, extant empirical findings from more than two decades of research on the effects on mindfulness training on attention are mixed and provide only partial support for this central theoretical premise. To account for these findings, as well as to advance field-wide understanding of mindfulness mechanisms of action, we propose the Mindfulness Internal Attention (MIA) framework. We theorize that mindfulness training primarily targets internal attentional processes that operate on internally generated- or stored- experiences and mental representations (e.g., bodily sensations, thoughts). Moreover, we theorize that the effects of mindfulness training on internal attention generalize to late-stage external attentional processes that operate on abstracted representations of external information and share cognitive resources with internal attention (e.g., inhibitory control, shifting, and updating working memory). In contrast, we theorize that mindfulness training will not likely impact early-stage external attentional processes that operate on sensory-perceptual information (e.g., alerting and exogenous orienting to visual stimuli). Finally, we propose that internal attentional processes subserve central salutary mechanisms of mindfulness (e.g., decentering, acceptance) and thereby are essential for the salutary effects of mindfulness training. We report a critical review of empirical findings that examines and provides support for the MIA framework. Finally, we propose future directions related to the integration of emerging measures of internal attention into mindfulness research, study of the shared resources between external and internal attention in mindfulness training, and study of internal attentional processes as mechanisms of mindfulness training.