Mindfulness and Meditation Training

Abstract

This chapter reviews evidence that practicing meditation positively impacts attention. Functional and structural enhancements in parts of the salience and executive networks are described. At the behavioral level, the effect of meditation on tasks of controlled attention (such as Stroop and go/no-go tasks) is found to be about 0.4 SD; a smaller effect of about 0.25 SD is noted on sustained attention; no effect is found on the alerting component of the ANT, although there are consistent effects on different aspects of nonjudgmental alerting (such as attentional blink and error processing), with an effect size of about 0.5 SD for attentional blink studies. Meditation also lowers perceptual thresholds. Dose-response relationship studies underscore the importance of frequency or amount of recent meditation practice, rather than accumulated hours of practice.