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Mindfulness and Meditation Training

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Cognitive 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 similar effect is noted on sustained attention; there are also consistent effects on different aspects of nonjudgmental alerting (such as attentional blink and error processing), with an effect size of 0.65 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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All effect sizes are reported such that a positive effect indicates that the hypothesis of better attention in meditators is confirmed; in the case of Stroop, a positive effect size would thus indicate that meditators have a smaller Stroop effect.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Paul Verhaeghen

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  1. Paul Verhaeghen
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Correspondence to Paul Verhaeghen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Medical School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Tilo Strobach

  2. Department of Psychology, Goethe-University Frankfurt, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

    Julia Karbach

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Verhaeghen, P. (2016). Mindfulness and Meditation Training. In: Strobach, T., Karbach, J. (eds) Cognitive Training. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42662-4_12

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