Key result
A short-term session of loving-kindness meditation significantly improved response time, pulse pressure, and cerebral hemodynamics during a sustained attention task in first-time meditators.
Why the study?
Although meditation improves psychological health and cognition, few studies have used fNIRS to evaluate its effects on cerebral hemodynamics and sustained attention.
Does a short-term session of loving-kindness meditation improve sustained attention in first-time meditators?
Does a short-term session of loving-kindness meditation improve sustained attention in first-time meditators?
A short-term session of loving-kindness meditation improves cognitive, physiological, and behavioral outcomes related to sustained attention in first-time meditators.
Meditation may safely enhance cognition; novel Level 5 finding leaves open validation in controlled trials.
Cognitive abilities such as attention, memory, processing time, perception, and reasoning can be augmented using some type of intervention. Within the broad range of conventional and unconventional intervention methods used in cognitive enhancement, meditation is one of those that is safe, widely practiced by many since ancient times, and has been shown to reduce stress and improve psychological health and cognitive functioning. Various neuroimaging studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) have shown functional and structural changes due to meditation in different types of meditation practices and on various groups of meditators. Recently, a few studies on meditation have used functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study the effects of meditation on cerebral hemodynamics. In this study, we examined the short-term effects of loving-kindness (LK) meditation on sustained attention using behavioral performance measures, physiological outcomes, and cognitive activity as measured by fNIRS in first-time meditators during Stroop color word task (SCWT) performance. Our results indicated that behavioral outcomes, assessed mainly on response time (RT) during SCWT performance, showed a significant decrease after meditation. As expected, physiological measures, primarily pulse pressure (PP) measured after meditation dropped significantly as compared to the before meditation measurement. For the hemodynamic measures of oxygenated-hemoglobin (HbO2), deoxygenated-hemoglobin (Hb), and total-hemoglobin (HbT), our findings show significant differences in SCWT performance before and after meditation. Our results suggest that LK meditation can result in improvements in cognitive, physiological, and behavioral outcomes of first-time meditators after a short-term session.
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İzzetoğlu et al. (2020) studied First-time meditators. Loving-kindness (LK) meditation vs. Before meditation (baseline) was evaluated on Sustained attention (response time, pulse pressure, and cerebral hemodynamics during Stroop color word task). A short-term session of loving-kindness meditation significantly improved response time, pulse pressure, and cerebral hemodynamics during a sustained attention task in first-time meditators.
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