No effect of focused attention and open monitoring meditation on EEG auditory mismatch negativity in expert and novice practitioners.

A well-powered experiment found no evidence that focused attention or open monitoring meditation alters the auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitude—a brain response linked to automatic change detection—in either expert or novice practitioners, failing to replicate earlier findings. Bayesian analysis provided strong evidence against any interaction between expertise and meditation practice on MMN amplitude, strong evidence against effects of either meditation practice compared to a control condition, and moderate evidence against an effect of expertise during meditation. The study did replicate increased alpha oscillatory power during meditation. The null results are discussed in light of low statistical power, flexible analysis methods, and possible publication bias in prior work.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) is a well characterized event-related potential component which has gained recent attention in theoretical models describing the impact of various styles of mindfulness meditation on attentional processes and perceptual inference. Previous findings highlighted a distinct modulation of the MMN amplitude by different meditation practices and degrees of expertise. In the present study, we attempted to replicate results from the recent literature with a data sample that allowed for increased statistical power compared to previous experiments. Relying on traditional frequentist analysis, we found no effect of focused attention and open monitoring meditation on the auditory MMN amplitude compared to a control condition (silent movie) in expert or novice practitioners (all p > 0.17), providing a non-replication of our previous work (Fucci et al. 2018). Using a Bayesian approach, we found strong evidence against an interaction effect on the MMN amplitude between expertise groups and meditation practices (BF01 = 11.0), strong evidence against effects of either meditation practices compared to the control condition (BF01 between 11.9 and 16.1) and moderate evidence against an effect of expertise during meditation (BF01 between 5.3 and 7.9). On the other hand, we replicated previous evidence of increased alpha oscillatory power during meditation practices compared to a control state (p < 0.001). We discuss our null findings in relation to factors that could undermine the replicability of previous research on this subject, namely low statistical power, use of flexible analysis methods and a possible publication bias leading to a misrepresentation of the available evidence.