Meditation and Attention : A Review of Current Findings

Sammanfattning:

A prominent model of attention recognizes three attentional networks which are the alerting, orienting, and executive networks. The attention network test (ANT) has been developed to give measures on each respective attentional network. Meditation is a growing research area and it has become known that the elements of meditation practice show striking similarities with contemporary concepts of attention. Three general categories of meditation have been identified to date, which are focused attention (FA), open monitoring (OM), and automatic self-transcending (AST) meditation. The author reviews findings from contemporary attention research and then describes each of the meditation categories before going on to present the current state of meditation research as it relates to attention. Current evidence suggests that meditation engages and can improve the functioning of the attentional networks although results are preliminary and many studies suffer methodological weaknesses. Possible effects of meditation in other cognitive and affective domains, together with its potential clinical relevance, are also discussed.