Investigating the effects of focused attention (mantra) meditation on mismatch negativity: Insights into sensory and cognitive processing using an intensity oddball paradigm.
Neuroscience April 6, 2025 Chandan Srivastava, Jamie A O'Reilly, Rashmi Gupta 2 citations
Long-term focused attention meditation may improve attentional control, but its effects on mismatch negativity (MMN)—a neural marker of involuntary attention shifts to unexpected sounds—remain unclear. Previous studies mixed short- and long-term meditation effects and mostly examined breath-based meditation. This study tested mantra meditation practitioners and novices using an intensity oddball paradigm, which assesses whether MMN reflects higher-order cognitive processes or sensory adaptation. Experts and novices showed similar MMN amplitude, suggesting MMN may be insensitive to meditation expertise or that novices' attentional skills also influence it. A unidirectional polarity shift in event-related potentials to deviant stimuli indicates meditation effects on MMN likely relate to higher-order deviance detection.