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.

Weng et al. Brain Decoding of Meditation States to breath compared to MW or self-referential processing. This paradigm established the feasibility of using MVPA classifiers to objectively assess mental states during meditation at the participant level, which holds promise for improved measurement of internal attention states cultivated by meditation.

Assessing cognitive abilities in children is challenging for two primary reasons: lack of testing engagement can lead to low testing sensitivity and inherent performance variability. Here we sought to explore whether an engaging, adaptive digital cognitive platform built to look and feel like a video game would reliably measure attention-based abilities in children with and without neurodevelopmental disabilities related to a known genetic condition, 16p11.2 deletion. We assessed 20 children with 16p11.2 deletion, a genetic variation implicated in attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism, as well as 16 siblings without the deletion and 75 neurotypical age-matched children. Deletion carriers showed significantly slower response times and greater response variability when compared with all non-carriers; by comparison, traditional non-adaptive selective attention assessments were unable to discriminate group differences. This phenotypic characterization highlights the potential power of administering tools that integrate adaptive psychophysical mechanics into video-game-style mechanics to achieve robust, reliable measurements.

Daily experiences demand both focused and broad allocation of attention for us to interact efficiently with our complex environments. Many types of attention have shown age-related decline, although there is also evidence that such deficits may be remediated with cognitive training. However, spatial attention abilities have shown inconsistent age-related differences, and the extent of potential enhancement of these abilities remains unknown. Here, we assessed spatial attention in both healthy younger and older adults and trained this ability in both age groups for 5 hr over the course of 2 weeks using a custom-made, computerized mobile training application. We compared training-related gains on a spatial attention assessment and spatial working memory task to age-matched controls who engaged in expectancy-matched, active placebo computerized training. Age-related declines in spatial attention abilities were observed regardless of task difficulty. Spatial attention training led to improved focused and distributed attention abilities as well as improved spatial working memory in both younger and older participants. No such improvements were observed in either of the age-matched control groups. Note that these findings were not a function of improvements in simple response time, as basic motoric function did not change after training. Furthermore, when using change in simple response time as a covariate, all findings remained significant. These results suggest that spatial attention training can lead to enhancements in spatial working memory regardless of age.

Evidence suggests meditation may improve health and well-being. However, understanding how meditation practices impact therapeutic outcomes is poorly characterized, in part because existing measures cannot track internal attentional states during meditation. To address this, we applied machine learning to track fMRI brain activity patterns associated with distinct mental states during meditation. Individualized brain patterns were distinguished for different forms of internal attention (breath attention, mind wandering, and self-referential processing) during a directed internal attention task. Next, these brain patterns were used to track the internal focus of attention, from moment to moment, for meditators and matched controls 2 during breath-focused meditation. We observed that while all participants spent the majority of time attending to breath (vs. mind wandering or self-referential processing), meditators with more lifetime practice demonstrated greater overall breath attention. This new framework holds promise for elucidating therapeutic mechanisms of meditation and furthering precision medicine approaches to health.Meditation practices, or mental exercises that train qualities of attention, are increasingly used to improve health and well-being in clinical populations as well as the general public. Meditation and mindfulness-based interventions may cultivate sustained attention 1-3 , compassionand prosocial behavior 4-6 , creativity 7 , improved brain structure and function 8-11 , less implicit bias 12 , reduced stress 13 , and decreased symptoms in clinical populations with pain 14 , depression 13,15 , anxiety 13 , and cancer 16 . Based on these promising results, meditation practices are being implemented in a variety of fields such as medicine, psychology, education, business, law, and politics 17 . Collectively, meditation practices may strengthen interoception (awareness of internal bodily sensations) 18,19 , cognitive processes (including sustained attention, cognitive monitoring, and meta-awareness) 3,20,21 , and emotion regulation (less judgment and more equanimity with internal experiences) 22,23 . With practice, these skills may lead to better monitoring and regulation of physical, emotional, and social processes, contributing to improved health decision-making and behaviors 18,19 . However, the mechanisms through which meditation improves health and well-being are poorly specified, in part because there is currently no precise way to assess the quality of meditation practice 17 . Mental states during meditation are challenging to measure because they are often internal, diverse, and fluctuating. For example, in a core practice of focused attention to the 3 breath, meditators focus their attention on sensations of the breath, until they notice distraction by other internal or external stimuli, and then nonjudgmentally return their focus to the breath. Even in this simple practice, distinct mental states may occur and are dynamically fluctuating over time: the object of attention (breath or dis...