Investigating the effects of focused attention (mantra) meditation on mismatch negativity: Insights into sensory and cognitive processing using an intensity oddball paradigm.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Over the past fifty years, research has enhanced our understanding of meditation and its effects on cognition. Meditation is particularly promising due to its long-term (trait) effects, which persist outside meditation sessions. Advances in neuroimaging have enabled the study of these effects using neural markers such as mismatch negativity (MMN), which reflects the involuntary shift of attention to unexpected acoustic changes. This shift is modulated by attentional control, a key area where focused attention (FA) meditation training offers improvements. However, studies investigating the trait effects of FA meditation on MMN have produced mixed results, with previous research introducing confounds from short-term (state) effects that may influence trait-specific assessments. Furthermore, most research has focused on breath-based FA meditation, overlooking other prominent forms of FA meditation that might differentially modulate MMN, as per recent studies. The current study, therefore, examines mantra meditation, a widely practiced form of FA meditation, with an adequately powered sample to address the mixed findings in the literature. The study employs an intensity oddball paradigm instead of commonly used frequency oddball paradigms to assess whether MMN arises from higher-order cognitive processes or sensory adaptation. The findings reveal similar MMN amplitude in experts and novices, suggesting that MMN may be insensitive to meditation expertise or influenced by the enhanced attentional skills of novices. Additionally, a unidirectional polarity shift in event-related potential to deviant stimuli suggests that meditation effects on MMN are likely to be interpreted in the context of higher-order deviance detection mechanism.