Fujino Masahiro, Ooishi Yuuki, Ueda Yoshiyuki, Kitagawa Norimichi, Nomura Michio
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Kanagawa, Japan.
Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2024 Oct 1;15:1445327. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1445327. eCollection 2024.
Mindfulness meditation, comprising focused attention and open monitoring meditations, has been shown to enhance performance on cognitive interference tasks. While this enhancement has been considered not to result from distractor inhibition, no empirical evidence has been provided through behavioral data. In this study, we investigated whether 30-min interventions of focused attention and open monitoring meditations could reduce distractor inhibition in 72 meditation-naïve participants divided into focused attention meditation, open monitoring meditation, and control groups.
We employed a task set that combined a cognitive interference task with subsequent preference judgment and surprise recognition tasks, utilizing the mere exposure effect paradigm, along with state and trait questionnaires. The mere exposure effect shows that repeated exposure to face images increases one's preference for them. However, this effect is reduced if participants consciously or unconsciously try to inhibit the face images during stimulus processing. In the cognitive interference task, they judged the direction of the letter superimposed on a distractor face image. In the subsequent preference judgment task, they were asked to rate the preference of face images, half of which were presented in the interference task and the remaining half were not presented. We hypothesized that inhibiting face images presented as distractors would lead to a decrease in preference for them.
We found that the mere exposure effect was observed in focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation groups but not in the control group, indicating that compared to the control, focused attention and open monitoring meditations reduce inhibition processes for distractors during cognitive interference tasks. Furthermore, we found a positive correlation between the intensity of the mere exposure effect and state relaxation before the cognitive interference task as well as a negative correlation between the intensity of the mere exposure effect and state anxiety in the focused attention meditation group, but not in the open monitoring meditation group. This suggests that the processes of reducing inhibition in focused attention and open monitoring meditations differ. Our findings contribute to understanding the attentional mechanisms underlying mindfulness meditation during cognitive interference.
正念冥想，包括专注注意力冥想和开放式监控冥想，已被证明能提高认知干扰任务的表现。虽然这种提高被认为不是由干扰抑制引起的，但尚未通过行为数据提供实证证据。在本研究中，我们调查了30分钟的专注注意力冥想和开放式监控冥想干预是否能减少72名从未冥想过的参与者的干扰抑制，这些参与者被分为专注注意力冥想组、开放式监控冥想组和对照组。
我们采用了一个任务集，将认知干扰任务与随后的偏好判断和惊奇识别任务相结合，利用单纯曝光效应范式，以及状态和特质问卷。单纯曝光效应表明，反复接触面部图像会增加人们对它们的偏好。然而，如果参与者在刺激处理过程中有意或无意地试图抑制面部图像，这种效应就会减弱。在认知干扰任务中，他们判断叠加在干扰面部图像上的字母的方向。在随后的偏好判断任务中，他们被要求对面部图像的偏好进行评分，其中一半面部图像在干扰任务中呈现，另一半未呈现。我们假设抑制作为干扰物呈现的面部图像会导致对它们的偏好降低。
我们发现，专注注意力冥想组和开放式监控冥想组中观察到了单纯曝光效应，而对照组中没有，这表明与对照组相比，专注注意力冥想和开放式监控冥想在认知干扰任务中减少了对干扰物的抑制过程。此外，我们发现专注注意力冥想组中单纯曝光效应的强度与认知干扰任务前的状态放松之间存在正相关，而单纯曝光效应的强度与状态焦虑之间存在负相关，而开放式监控冥想组中则没有。这表明专注注意力冥想和开放式监控冥想中减少抑制的过程有所不同。我们的研究结果有助于理解认知干扰期间正念冥想背后的注意力机制。
