Mindfulness Training

  1. Two aspects of mindfulness meditation
    • Concentrative
    • Open meditation
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Cold Control
    Attention
  6. Hot Control
    Emotion Regulation
  7. 3 Components of Attention
    • Orienting
    • Executive Control
    • Alerting
  8. 3 components of orienting
    • engage
    • disengage
    • move
  9. Engage (process and brain region)
    • Engage selective processing at cued location
    • Intraparietal Sulcus (IPS)
  10. Disengage (process and brain region)
    • Disengage from irrelevant location
    • Temporal-parietal Junction (TPJ)
  11. Move (process and brain region)
    • Move attention to the relevant location
    • Superior Parietal Lobule (SPL)
  12. 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
  13. Jha 2007 study Nurses and orienting findings
    Mindfulness Training group is faster at orienting to relevant location
  14. 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
  15. Selective Attention
    Allows preferential processing of relevant info while ignoring irrelevant or distracting info
  16. Working Memory
    allows internal representations of relevant information to be maintained and manipulated over short intervals without getting distracted by irrelevant info
  17. Delayed-Recognition Task
    • S1 (Encode)
    • Time (Maintain)
    • S2 (Retrieve/Respond)
  18. 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
  19. High Stress Military cohorts experience
    depletion of working memory capacity
  20. Operation span task
    • Remember letters
    • arithmetic correct?
    • remember letters
    • arithmetic correct?
  21. Difference between civilians and military on Ospan task
    military do worse on task from T1-T2 than civilians, shoes reduced WM capacity
  22. M-Fit
    • Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training
    • predeployment military context
    • 30 mins of HW
    • logged practice time
  23. 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
Author
jstagl
ID
84671
Card Set
Mindfulness Training
Description
Cog Neuro Exam #3
Updated