Intensive meditation training improves perceptual discrimination and sustained attention.
Psychological science – June 01, 2010
Source: PubMed
Summary
Ever notice your focus waver? Intensive meditation training can sharpen it. Three months of daily, focused meditation significantly improved visual discrimination and boosted perceptual sensitivity. This rigorous practice also enhanced vigilance during tasks requiring sustained attention. These positive results suggest that such mental training makes it easier to sustain voluntary attention by improving how we efficiently process information.
Abstract
The ability to focus one's attention underlies success in many everyday tasks, but voluntary attention cannot be sustained for extended periods of time. In the laboratory, sustained-attention failure is manifest as a decline in perceptual sensitivity with increasing time on task, known as the vigilance decrement. We investigated improvements in sustained attention with training (approximately 5 hr/day for 3 months), which consisted of meditation practice that involved sustained selective attention on a chosen stimulus (e.g., the participant's breath). Participants were randomly assigned either to receive training first (n = 30) or to serve as waiting-list controls and receive training second (n = 30). Training produced improvements in visual discrimination that were linked to increases in perceptual sensitivity and improved vigilance during sustained visual attention. Consistent with the resource model of vigilance, these results suggest that perceptual improvements can reduce the resource demand imposed by target discrimination and thus make it easier to sustain voluntary attention.