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Meditation and auditory attention: An ERP study of meditators and non-meditators

, , , , , , , ,
1 School of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
2 Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
3 ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, New South Wales, New South Wales, Australia
4 ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
5 MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
6 Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2318v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Psychiatry and Psychology
Keywords
ERPs, N1, MMN, auditory attention, meditation
Copyright
© 2016 Biedermann et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Biedermann B, de Lissa P, Mahajan Y, Polito V, Badcock NA, Connors MH, Quinto L, Larsen L, McArthur GM. 2016. Meditation and auditory attention: An ERP study of meditators and non-meditators. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2318v1

Abstract

A recent meta-analysis emphasises that meditation can improve attention in healthy adults (Sedlmeier et al., 2012). The findings of a study by Cahn and Polich (2009) suggests that there is an effect of a meditative state on three event-related potential (ERP) brain markers of low-level auditory attention in expert meditators: the N1, the P2, and the P3a. The current study built on these findings by examining the trait and state effects of meditation on the passive auditory mismatch negativity (MMN), N1, and P2 ERPs. We found that the MMN was significantly larger in meditators than non-meditators regardless of whether they were meditating or not (a trait effect), and that the N1 was significantly attenuated during meditation in non-meditators but not meditators (an interaction between trait and state). These outcomes suggest that low-level attention is superior in long-term meditators in general. In contrast, low-level attention is reduced in non-meditators when they are asked to meditate for the first time, possibly due to cognitive overload.

Author Comment

This is an initial preprint of an article, planned to be submitted to an external journal.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

Genevieve McArthur and Nicholas Badcock are Academic Editors for PeerJ.

Author Contributions

Britta Biedermann conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Peter de Lissa conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Yatin Mahajan conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Vince Polito conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Nicholas A Badcock performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Michael H Connors performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Lena Quinto performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Linda Larsen performed the experiments, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Genevieve M McArthur conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Ethics

The following information was supplied relating to ethical approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee. Reference number: 5201000950

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

The ethics agreement at the commencement of the study does not allow for open sharing of the data.

Funding

The authors received no funding for this work

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Meditation and auditory attention: An ERP study of meditators and non-meditators
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