The effects of mindfulness meditation on mechanisms of attentional control in young and older adults: a preregistered eye tracking study.

Thirty days of guided mindfulness meditation using a mobile app improved the speed of saccadic eye movements (overt orienting of attention) in adults, but did not reduce distractibility or enhance goal-directed attentional control beyond repeated task practice. The benefits were similar across young, middle-aged, and older adults, and no changes appeared in self-report mindfulness questionnaires. The findings suggest that short-term mindfulness practice can modulate cognition in ways detectable by eye tracking but not by self-report, and that age does not moderate these effects.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Neuroimaging data reveal that a functional locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NA) system is critical in maintaining cognitive performance during aging. However, older adults show reduced LC integrity and altered functional connectivity, demonstrating both structural declines and dysfunction. The LC-NA system mediates mechanisms of attention processing and eye tracking studies have shown that older adults are slower and more distractible compared with young adults in visual search tasks. Prior studies have shown that mindfulness meditation modulates LC noradrenergic activity, increases gray matter volume in the brainstem, and improves attentional control. Thus, in a preregistered longitudinal study, we investigated whether thirty days of guided mindfulness meditation using a mobile application improved attentional control measured with eye movements. We hypothesized that older adults would show greater benefits from the mindfulness intervention compared with young adults. In two oculomotor search tasks, we identified that guided mindfulness practice improved saccadic reaction times, but that other longitudinal benefits in goal-directed attentional control or distractibility by task-irrelevant salient stimuli may be from repeated practice. Furthermore, we did not find evidence for age differences in response to the mindfulness intervention between young, middle-aged, and older adults, nor among scores on mindfulness questionnaires. Our findings show that short-term mindfulness practice can modulate cognition, specifically with the speed of overt orienting of attention, that may not be observable in self-report measures. This study is the first to show the utility of mindfulness on cognition using a highly reliable measure in eye movements and suggests future longer term intervention studies may be warranted.Significance Statement In a preregistered study, we investigated whether thirty days of guided mindfulness meditation can improve mechanisms of attentional control measured with eye tracking. We identified that mindfulness improved saccadic reaction times but found that the benefits did not differentially affect young, middle-aged, or older adults. Our findings reveal that short-term mindfulness practice can improve attention processing in ways that may not be observable in self-report questionnaires.