Closed-loop digital meditation improves sustained attention in young adults

Abstract

Attention is a fundamental cognitive process that is critical for essentially all aspects of higher-order cognition and real-world activities. Younger generations have deeply embraced information technology and multitasking in their personal lives, school, and the workplace, creating myriad challenges to their attention. While improving sustained attention in healthy young adults would be beneficial, enhancing this ability has proven notoriously difficult in this age group. Here we show that six-weeks of engagement with a meditation-inspired, closed-loop software program (MediTrain) delivered on mobile devices led to gains in both sustained attention and working memory in healthy young adults ( n = 22). These improvements were associated with positive changes in key neural signatures of attentional control (frontal theta inter-trial coherence and parietal P3b latency), as measured by electroencephalography. Our findings suggest the utility of delivering aspects of the ancient practice of focused-attention meditation in a modern, technology-based approach and its benefits on enhancing sustained attention.

Closed-Loop Attention Restoration Theory for Virtual Reality-Based Attentional Engagement Enhancement

“…With two time points ("before and after" the ART interventions), two groups (ST-ART/CL-ART), five measurements (RT, RTVar, P3b latency, ITC(θ), and IEC(θ)), and assuming a moderate repeated measures correlation (r = 0.5) and 0.05 α level, we calculated that n = 30 would yield 93% power to detect a change with a medium effect size (0.5). This effect size is not uncommon, as shown in Reference [11].…”

“…As shown in Table 2, behavioral performance and EEG-based neural metrics captured during a perceptual discrimination task (visual oddball) that was executed before and after the two ART interventions were utilized as our outcome measures to assess the potential benefits of attention. Specifically, the commonly used response time (RT) [41][42][43] and event-related potential (ERP: P3b latency) [44] were used to evaluate the general benefits of attention; then, the response time across trials (RTVar [11,45]) and inter-trial coherence at the frontal midline theta band (ITC(θ) [11,46]) were used to assess the attentional engagement. Finally, the long-range frontal-posterior inter-electrode coherence at the theta band (IEC(θ)) was used to investigate the brain functional connectivity [42].…”

“…ITC is a measure that reflects the extent to which synchronization occurs from trial to trial in EEG at a particular frequency [46]. The frontal midline ITC in the theta frequency band, ITC(θ), is a widely used measure of electrophysiological response consistency [11,50]. Thus, we used it as our neural metric of the degree of attentional engagement.…”

“…Therefore, there exists a need for new methods to enhance attentional engagement. A recent study showed that six weeks (20-30 min per week) of training with a closed-loop digital meditation software delivered on a smartphone/tablet improved attentional engagement in young adults [11]. Here, "closed-loop" refers to a novel meditation training approach where the training difficulty can be adjusted in a rapid manner (e.g., every dozen seconds), according to the participant's performance.…”

Mindfulness Improves Brain Computer Interface Performance by Increasing Control over Neural Activity in the Alpha Band

“…Research claiming that the recognition of mind wandering is associated with increases in alpha power and activation of the salience network (which in turn has been linked to alpha power) suggest alpha rhythms play an integral role in the "letting go" of spontaneous thought (Sadaghiani et al 2010;Braboszcz and Delorme 2011b;Hasenkamp et al 2012;Ellamil et al 2016;Sadaghiani and Kleinschmidt 2016). In fact, reductions in neural noise, such as mind-wandering, are generally cited to explain why experienced mindfulness practitioners display enhanced abilities on tasks that probe attention Slagter et al 2009;MacLean et al 2010;Schoenberg et al 2014;Colzato et al 2015;Fox et al 2016;Ziegler et al 2019). The significant difference in the ability to follow the breath between the experimental and control groups subsequent to the MBSR intervention confirms previous reports that mindfulness is associated with reductions in mind wandering and the significant correlation between the ability to up-regulate alpha power during BCI control and breath counting accuracy suggests the MBSR participants may be engaging in meditative practices during the volitional rest trials of BCI control (Mrazek et al 2012a;Levinson et al 2014;Rahl et al 2017).…”