Effects of brief focused-attention and loving-kindness meditation on tacit social coordination, on-task thought, and other-orientation

In our previous study (Newman et al., in press, SCAN), dyad performance in a coordination task was shown to be amenable to manipulations of processes that underpin perspective-taking, namely working memory. When we diminished resources commonly implicated in observational perspective-taking, coordination performance also diminished. In this study, we expand on these findings to test whether performance could be improved by bolstering such resources. Participant dyads performed an iterated turn-based pure coordination task before and after one of three brief (~10 minute) interventions: focused-attention meditation (which has been shown to improve working memory), loving-kindness meditation (which increases integration of self- and other-oriented perspectives), or a neutral control. Using intermittent thought probes, we also assessed the degree to which participants across interventions engaged in mind-wandering, as well as the degree to which their attention was oriented towards either self-generated or other-generated actions. We found no significant differences in the effects of the interventions on mean coordination performance or thought probe responses. The loving-kindness meditation marginally enhanced trial-by-trial improvement in performance time-series when compared to the control. Dyads performed significantly better when other-oriented and showed greater convergence on shared decision rules over time than when self-oriented. On-task thought marginally decreased the number of trials needed for participants to align their responses, with significantly better performance on initial trials when on-task compared to when mind-wandering. This study demonstrates the particular importance of orienting attention beyond self-generated response in order to mutually adapt actions and mental states to achieve shared goals in iterated social coordination.