Reduced processing of afforded actions while observing mental content as ongoing mental phenomena

Abstract

While most current accounts of consciousness identify it with mental contents, certain meditation practices—like open monitoring (OM)—are said to enable a unique conscious state where meditators can experience mental content from a meta or a de-reified perspective as “ongoing phenomena.” Phenomenologically, such a state is considered as suspension (or reduction) of intentionality, the mental act upon mental content. Cognitively, we hypothesised that this de-reified state would be characterised by reduced mental actional processing of affording objects (like tools). We recruited two groups of participants, meditators with long-term experience/expertise in cultivating a de-reified state, and demographically-matched novice meditators. Participants were shown images in two configurations, one where objects implied actions (high-affordance) and one where they did not (low-affordance). Images in one of these two configurations were presented in one eye along with an image of a grating in the other eye inducing binocular rivalry with alternating perceptual awareness of the two images. This binocular rivalry task was administered following both a baseline and OM-induced de-reified state, along with EEG recordings. While long-term meditators reported perceiving the high-affordance image (in proportion to the grating image) longer than the low-affordance image during baseline—due to preferential processing of action-affording images—such an effect was abolished during the OM state, as hypothesised. For novices, however, the high-affordance configuration was preferred over the low-affordance one both during baseline and OM. Across all participants and conditions, perceptual durations of objects positively correlated with the magnitude of µ-rhythm desynchronization, an EEG marker of affordance processing. Our results suggest that OM styles of meditation may help in mentally decoupling otherwise automatic cognitive processing of mental actions by affording objects – thus, preventing mental “grasping” of conscious contents. Such a cognitive process might underlie meditation-induced improvements in mental wellbeing.