Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition, UPS, Université de Toulouse Toulouse, France ; CERCO, CNRS UMR5549 Toulouse, France.
Department of Psychiatry and Human Behaviour, UC Irvine Orange, CA, USA.
Front Psychol. 2013 Dec 12;4:914. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00914. eCollection 2013.
Meditation has lately received considerable interest from cognitive neuroscience. Studies suggest that daily meditation leads to long lasting attentional and neuronal plasticity. We present changes related to the attentional systems before and after a 3 month intensive meditation retreat. We used three behavioral psychophysical tests - a Stroop task, an attentional blink task, and a global-local letter task-to assess the effect of Isha yoga meditation on attentional resource allocation. 82 Isha yoga practitioners were tested at the beginning and at the end of the retreat. Our results showed an increase in correct responses specific to incongruent stimuli in the Stroop task. Congruently, a positive correlation between previous meditation experience and accuracy to incongruent Stroop stimuli was also observed at baseline. We also observed a reduction of the attentional blink. Unexpectedly, a negative correlation between previous meditation experience and attentional blink performance at baseline was observed. Regarding spatial attention orientation as assessed using the global-local letter task, participants showed a bias toward local processing. Only slight differences in performance were found pre- vs. post- meditation retreat. Biasing toward the local stimuli in the global-local task and negative correlation of previous meditation experience with attentional blink performance is consistent with Isha practices being focused-attention practices. Given the relatively small effect sizes and the absence of a control group, our results do not allow clear support nor rejection of the hypothesis of meditation-driven neuronal plasticity in the attentional system for Isha yoga practice.
冥想最近受到认知神经科学的广泛关注。研究表明，每天冥想会导致注意力和神经元的长期可塑性。我们展示了在为期 3 个月的密集冥想静修前后与注意力系统相关的变化。我们使用了三种行为心理物理测试——Stroop 任务、注意力眨眼任务和全局-局部字母任务——来评估艾萨瑜伽冥想对注意力资源分配的影响。82 名艾萨瑜伽练习者在静修开始和结束时接受了测试。我们的结果表明，在 Stroop 任务中对不一致刺激的正确反应增加。一致的是，在基线时，以前的冥想经验与对不一致 Stroop 刺激的准确性之间也观察到正相关。我们还观察到注意力眨眼的减少。出乎意料的是，在基线时，以前的冥想经验与注意力眨眼表现之间观察到负相关。使用全局-局部字母任务评估空间注意力方向时，参与者表现出对局部处理的偏向。冥想前后的表现仅略有差异。在全局-局部任务中偏向局部刺激，以及以前的冥想经验与注意力眨眼表现之间的负相关，与艾萨实践是专注注意力实践一致。由于相对较小的效应量和缺乏对照组，我们的结果既不能明确支持也不能否定艾萨瑜伽练习注意力系统中冥想驱动的神经元可塑性的假设。
