Cognitive Aging and Long-Term Maintenance of Attentional Improvements Following Meditation Training
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Source: CrossRef
Summary
Remarkably, intensive meditation training can help preserve sharp focus for years, even as we age. Researchers explored if dedicated mental practice could offer lasting benefits against age-related cognitive decline. Following a 3-month full-time meditation program, participants' attentional improvements were partially maintained up to seven years later. Crucially, continued meditation practice significantly moderated typical age-related declines in sustained attention and response inhibition. This suggests that ongoing mental training has the potential to positively alter long-term cognitive trajectories, offering enduring benefits for brain health across the lifespan.
Abstract
Sustained attention is effortful, demanding, and subject to limitations associated with age-related cognitive decline. Researchers have sought to examine whether attentional capacities can be enhanced through directed mental training, with a number of studies now offering evidence that meditation practice may facilitate generalized improvements in this domain. However, the extent to which attentional gains are maintained following periods of dedicated meditation training and how such improvements are moderated by processes of aging have yet to be characterized. In a prior report (Sahdra et al., Emotion 11, 299–312, 2011), we examined attentional performance on a sustained response inhibition task before, during, and after 3-months of full-time meditation. We now extend this prior investigation across additional follow-up assessments occurring up to 7 years after the conclusion of training. Performance improvements observed during periods of intensive practice were partially maintained several years later. Importantly, aging-related decrements in measures of response inhibition accuracy and reaction time variability were moderated by levels of continued meditation practice across the follow-up period. The present study is the first to offer evidence that intensive and continued meditation practice is associated with enduring improvements in sustained attention and response inhibition, with the potential to alter longitudinal trajectories of cognitive change across the lifespan.