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Two aspects of mindfulness meditation
- Concentrative
- Open meditation
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Conentrative meditation
- focus attention on 1 thing (mantra, breath)
- simplest form is to sit quietly and focus attention on the breath
- zooming lens of attention
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Open meditation
- opening attention to become aware of continuously passing sensations and feelings, images, thought, sounds, smells, without becoming involved in thinking about them
- simpley witness whatever goes through the mind, not reacting or becoming involved with memories, worries, or images
- return attention to the breath
- widening the lens of attention
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Mechanisms of Mindfulness
- Improves CONTROL PROCESSES
- Effortful and volunatry mental activity to ensure that present moment beahvior and thoughts are in line with one's current goals
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Hot Control
Emotion Regulation
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3 Components of Attention
- Orienting
- Executive Control
- Alerting
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3 components of orienting
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Engage (process and brain region)
- Engage selective processing at cued location
- Intraparietal Sulcus (IPS)
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Disengage (process and brain region)
- Disengage from irrelevant location
- Temporal-parietal Junction (TPJ)
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Move (process and brain region)
- Move attention to the relevant location
- Superior Parietal Lobule (SPL)
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Example of Engage-Disengage-Move in Mindfulness
- Engage attention on the breath
- Disengage attention from irrelevant task (non-breath focus)
- Move attention back to the breath
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Jha 2007 study Nurses and orienting findings
Mindfulness Training group is faster at orienting to relevant location
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Attentional Blink Paradigm
- Flutter of numbers and letters and you have to remember the first and second number.
- When shorter interval time between 1st and 2nd number, people miss the second number, but this effect is reduced (mental stickiness reduced) in practitioners of MT
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Selective Attention
Allows preferential processing of relevant info while ignoring irrelevant or distracting info
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Working Memory
allows internal representations of relevant information to be maintained and manipulated over short intervals without getting distracted by irrelevant info
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Delayed-Recognition Task
- S1 (Encode)
- Time (Maintain)
- S2 (Retrieve/Respond)
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MT and Delayed-Recognition Task (the tasks, control performance, medical students performance)
- Task 1- remember face over 3 seconds
- Task 2- remember 2 faces over 3 seconds
- Distraction item- shoe or face
Overall- performance is reduced with greater WM demands (most accuracy with shoe distraction and 1 face. least accuracy with face distraction and 2 faces) (low load- discongruent distractors)
However- Working Memory improves with MT, had better accuracy in all conditions for medical students
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High Stress Military cohorts experience
depletion of working memory capacity
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Operation span task
- Remember letters
- arithmetic correct?
- remember letters
- arithmetic correct?
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Difference between civilians and military on Ospan task
military do worse on task from T1-T2 than civilians, shoes reduced WM capacity
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M-Fit
- Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training
- predeployment military context
- 30 mins of HW
- logged practice time
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Results of M-Fit
- Changes in WM as shown by OSpan task.
- civilian controls- no change
- military controls (pre-deployment)- no change, poor WM
- military (pre-deployment) low practice- bad WM
- military (pre-deployment) high practice- improved WM
MT improves WM for military personnel pre-deployment, may be protective
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