Meditation and Metacontrol

Abstract

In addition to longer-term engagement in meditation, the past years have seen an increasing interest in the impact of single bouts of meditation on cognition. In this hypothesis and theory article, we adopt the distinction between focused-attention meditation (FAM) and open-monitoring meditation (OMM) and argue that these different types of meditation have different, to some degree, opposite impact on cognitive processes. We discuss evidence suggesting that single bouts of FAM and OMM are sufficient to bias cognitive control styles towards more versus less top-down control, respectively. We conclude that all meditation techniques are not equal and that successful meditation-based intervention requires the theoretically guided selection of the best-suited technique.